The answer is not much that is good. The P.A. is run by a bunch of cruel, miserable, hateful, corrupt fascists. If the Palestinians do not want any economic contact with Israel, then good! No Palestinians need to go to Israel for health care services, and Israel should not be supplying its enemies with fuel, electricity, water, and jobs. I also see no reason why Israelis need to hire Palestinians – what there are no unemployed in Israel? Jews are too proud to pick up garbage. The nihilistic Palestinians need to be kept away from Israel until one day if by some miracle they become civilized. Also arming their so called security forces is a recipe for disaster.
by Caroline Glick
Two weeks ago, a Palestinian from Bethlehem was arrested by the US-financed and trained Palestinian Authority security forces. He was charged with “carrying out commercial transactions with residents of a hostile state.”
No, he was not buying uranium from Iran. His purported crime was purchasing wood products from an Israeli community located beyond the 1949 armistice lines.
Denied bail by the US-funded PA magistrate’s court in Bethlehem, he has been remanded to custody pending the conclusion of his trial.
This man’s arrest is part of what the unelected, US-supported Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has touted as his “National Honor Fund.” The goal of this project is to ban all economic contact between Palestinians and Jews who live and work beyond the 1949 armistice lines. As far as the supposedly moderate Fayyad is concerned, those Jews and Israel generally comprise the “hostile state,” that the Palestinians under Fayyad’s leadership are being compelled to boycott.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Palestinian Labor Minister Ahmed Majdalani said the PA hopes that by the end of the year all the thousands of Palestinians who are employed in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria will quit their jobs. What he didn’t mention is that if they don’t quit, they will be arrested.
According to PA Economics Minister Hassan Abu Libdeh, since the start of Fayyad’s campaign, the PA has confiscated $1 million worth of Israeli products including foods, cosmetics and hardware from Palestinian stores.
Fayyad’s measures come on top of previously enacted PA measures like imposing the death penalty on Palestinians who sell land to Jews. Less than two months ago, the PA reaffirmed that it will continue to execute any Palestinian who commits this “crime.”
There is no way to credibly claim that these actions advance either the cause of peaceful coexistence or Palestinian economic prosperity. Yet it is precisely in the hope of advancing these goals that the US government funds the PA.
DESPITE HIS campaign to boycott Israel and punish Palestinians with economic ties to the Jewish state, Fayyad is the US’s favorite Palestinian. Since PA President Mahmoud Abbas appointed Fayyad to lead the rump Fatah government in Judea and Samaria after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, US aid to the PA has increased by more than 700 percent. Most of this aid has gone to propping up Fayyad.
The US directly finances his budget. It funds and trains a Palestinian military. And it subsidizes his programs to build governmental institutions that loyally carry out his anti-Israel policies.
[…]
Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is expected to become the chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee in the next Congress, responded negatively to Clinton’s announced expansion of US aid to the PA. In a statement released by her office last Thursday, Ros-Lehtinen derided the assistance as a “bailout.”
She further commented, “It is deeply disturbing that the administration is continuing to bail out the Palestinian leadership when they continue to fail to meet their commitments, under international agreements and requirements outlined in US law, including dismantling the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure, combating corruption, stopping anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement and recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
Ros-Lehtinen authored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006, which conditioned US assistance to the PA on, among other things, “publicly acknowledge[ing] the Jewish state of Israel’s right to exist.”
[…]
First, it is far from clear that the PA needs this assistance. According to the International Monetary Fund and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2009 real GDP in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip grew by 6.8 percent, (8.5% in Judea and Samaria). The report also claimed that unemployment declined. So if things are going so well, why is it necessary for foreign donor countries to increase their direct assistance to Fayyad’s budget?
Second, given Fayyad’s rejection of free trade principles, particularly as they relate to Israel, the PA’s largest trading partner, it is hard to see how his economic leadership is credible. As the failed stimulus packages in the US have shown clearly, government bureaucracies do not create jobs. That is the work of the private sector. And yet, Fayyad is barring Palestinians from having trade ties with their most important business partners and commercial market. This is not the behavior of a leader who is interested in facilitating sustainable economic growth.
[…]
PROVIDING DIRECT budgetary assistance to Fayyad isn’t the only way the US finances Hamas. It also contributes to Hamas by funding UNRWA. US assistance to UNRWA has doubled in the last four years, largely as a way of avoiding providing direct aid to Hamas. Yet the CRS report notes, “In Gaza, most observers acknowledge that the role of UNRWA in providing basic services (i.e., food, health care, education) takes much of the governing burden off Hamas.”
In defending its assistance to UNRWA, the State Department told Congress that the aid “directly contributes to the US strategic interest of meeting the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, while promoting their self-sufficiency. UNRWA plays a stabilizing role in the Middle East through its assistance programs, serving as an important counterweight to extremists.”
[…]
But the fact of the matter is that UNRWA employees are Hamas members and sympathizers.
The incoming Congress might want to consider these basic truths before it approves further aid to Fayyad and his moderate government.
Read the rest here: What the PA buys with American money
