Evelyn Gordon:
The brutal terror attack in which a teenaged Palestinian murdered a 13-year-old Israeli in her own bed early this morning—an Israeli who was also an American citizen—is a perfect example of why a piece of legislation now moving through Congress is essential. The bill won’t end the Palestinian Authority’s abhorrent practice of paying generous salaries to the perpetrators of such murders. But it will at least stop it from doing so on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime.
A brief recap: The PA has for years paid above-market salaries to the perpetrators of anti-Israel terror attacks. The salaries range from 2,400 to 12,000 shekels a month and are paid for the duration of the perpetrator’s jail sentence in Israel (people killed while committing attacks get other benefits). The lower figure isroughly equivalent to the average–not minimum–wage for people who actually hold jobs in the West Bank, and about 40 percent higher than the average wage in Gaza; figures at the higher end of the range are the kind of salaries most Palestinians can’t even dream of. In short, the PA has made terror far more lucrative than productive work.
No less repulsive is the fact that the size of the monthly salary is tied to the length of the jail sentence. The highest payments go to those serving life sentences, meaning those who managed to murder at least one Israeli, while the lowest go to those serving the shortest sentences–i.e. failed terrorists who didn’t manage to kill or wound anyone. Thus, not only does the PA incentivize committing terror over getting a job, but it also incentivizes mass murder over minor offenses.
After discovering this in 2011, the organization Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) began hounding the PA’s Western donors over whether they really wanted to be spending taxpayers’ money to pay salaries to suicide bombers. The answer, it turned out, was yes: Virtually without exception, Western governments refused to cut donations to the PA over this issue. But under pressure from a few lawmakers and journalists who found this reprehensible, they eventually decided they needed a face-saving way to pretend their aid wasn’t being used to pay killers. So the PA obligingly provided one. In 2014, it announced that it would no longer pay these salaries; instead, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) would do it. And since Western donors give money to the PA, not the PLO, they would no longer be involved.
This was always a transparent fiction. Both organizations are headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and controlled by his Fatah faction, and money flows freely between them. But the indefatigable PMW soon provided hard evidence of this. In January 2015, for instance, the PA Finance Ministry announced that its annual budget included money for these salaries. Moreover, when Israel halted tax transfers to the PA in early 2015 over an unrelated dispute, the PA announced that due to its cash shortage, prisoners’ salaries would be cut. That would not have been unnecessary had the PLO actually been paying those salaries out of its own funds since the PLO doesn’t get any money from Israel to begin with.
None of this bothered Western governments. They continued pretending that the PA really had stopped paying these salaries, and the Obama Administration was no exception. But it did bother U.S. lawmakers.
Earlier this week, the Senate Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs approved a change in next year’s State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill. The change requires aid to the PA to be cut “by an amount the secretary [of state] determines is equivalent to the amount expended by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization and any successor or affiliated organizations, as payments for acts of terrorism by individuals who are imprisoned after being fairly tried and convicted for acts of terrorism, and by individuals who died committing acts of terrorism during the previous calendar year.”
The House approved a slightly different version, which also mentions the PLO but doesn’t include the phrase “and any successor or affiliated organizations.” Senator Dan Coats (R-Indiana), who introduced that phrase in the Senate, told theJerusalem Post he would try to persuade the House to adopt it, too, and his colleagues should listen. As he correctly said, absent language to preempt the possibility, the PA will simply create another face-saving dodge, and the State Department will surely accept it just like it accepted the PLO fiction.
Coats said he understands concerns that cutting aid to the PA could destabilize it, but believes “there’s a moral issue here that transcends that concern.” And he’s right: It’s simply immoral for America to be financing terror.
Moreover, adding insult to injury, the U.S. has always deducted the cost of settlement construction from loan guarantees to Israel. So essentially, U.S. government policy, as it stands now, is that building houses is a much worse crime than committing mass murder. Regardless of what you think of the settlements, that’s a moral outrage.
There’s an old adage: ”When you reward something, you get more of it.”
The terrorist-run Gaza Strip has convinced American leaders to subsidize their worst terrorists.
So, what if we, under a new Administration, were to cut off all rewards for terrorism?
What if the only way a Gazan could get American taxpayer money was to be a PRODUCTIVE member of society?
You know, a nurse, a doctor, a housing construction worker, a food grower….stuff like that.
No more militant wing of the so-&-so party members.
Not on our dime.
And, take a lesson from ACORN.
Yes, militant wings can change their organizations’ names as often as they change their leaders’ names.
And, look at the leaders of Hamas and Fatah: They ALL have quite a few names both spelling variants as well as AKAs.
There a easy way to stop supporting terrorists cut of all financing of the United Nations their one of the biggist supporters of terrorists in the world besides our own goverment under Obama the Fink
Is this really so hard to figure out and correct? In fact, until Palestinian support for terrorism ends, ALL aid should be cut off.