View from America: American tax dollars at work
.Jonathan Tobin , THE JERUSALEM POST Mar. 22, 2008Last week, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that American officials are again pressing Congress to open up the US aid pipeline to the Palestinian Authority. At the same time, as Reuters reported on March 19, Washington has already agreed to transfer $150 million in budgetary support to the PA to help Mahmoud Abbas's government, out of $550 million pledged at a donors conference last year.
If the plea for help for the Palestinians sounds familiar, it ought to. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Americans have been subsidizing the activities of the PA to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Today, as in the past, the arguments in favor of this policy are urgent. We are told by both administration officials who are friends of Israel and by some Israelis that unless we help fund the training and the payment of Palestinian security forces, the PA will have no way to cope with terrorists who want to sink any chance of a two-state solution which would enable Israel to live side by side with a peaceful Palestinian partner.
With Hamas in control of Gaza, the PA under Mahmoud Abbas, is - we are informed - the only address for creating a moderate force that will work for peace. Given the alternative of the Iranian-backed Hamas or the equally unpalatable choices of either Israel reoccupying the territories or an international peacekeeping force doing so, reinforcing the PA seems to make sense.
But does it really?
DOUBTS ABOUT the wisdom of the policy originally led Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.) - respectively, the chair and the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee - to place a hold on a request for another $150 million in direct assistance to the PA. The administration now seems to have gotten around that and has even asked the committee to okay an additional $25 million in indirect funding for the military training program.
Both Lowey and Ros-Lehtinen rightly worry about the commitment of Abbas and his Fatah Party to peace. They cite recent statements by Abbas in which he would not rule out a return to "armed resistance" against Israel. The support by the PA media - and of a majority of Palestinians - for attacks against Israelis, such as the slaughter of eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva this month, as well as the ongoing blitz of southern Israel by Hamas rockets, is also reason to doubt the PA's sincerity.
The PA also continues to honor the memory of slain terrorists as "martyrs" and, as The Jerusalem Post reported this week, plans to celebrate Israel's 60th birthday by having Arab refugees rush Israel's borders to promote a "right of return," which is synonymous with the destruction of the Jewish State.
SUPPORTERS of aid respond that these statements do not reflect Abbas's real goals. Yet they ignore the fact that what the PA has done for the past 15 years is to legitimize a Palestinian culture in which political plaudits are won only by killing Jews. Indeed, via its control of broadcast outlets, newspapers and the schools, the PA has solidified a mind-set of hate.
Just as bad is the history of attempts to create a PA security force. The Oslo Accords called for the creation of a Palestinian police force that would combat terrorists. But Yasser Arafat had other ideas.
While most of the billions that came his way via aid from the European Union and the United States went into the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of Fatah officials, some of the money was used to create a Byzantine web of Palestinian "security" agencies whose purposes were anything but peaceful. When push came to shove as Arafat blew up the peace after the Camp David summit in 2000, it was these PA forces (including some who'd been trained by my own Philadelphia Police Department) who committed terrorist acts against Israelis.
Adding to that sorry tale was the fiasco in Gaza in 2006, when Fatah thugs, aided and equipped by foreign sources at the specific instigation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sought to maintain Abbas' control of the area, even after the Hamas election victory.
AS DETAILED in an investigative report published in the April issue of Vanity Fair magazine, the concerns voiced by some Israelis and skeptical members of Congress over that particular venture in bolstering Abbas were prophetic.
While Fatah goons tortured and kidnapped some of their rivals, neither they nor their leader Abbas had the stomach to face down Hamas, despite promises to do so. In the end, Abbas's men wouldn't fight, and the more popular Hamas seized control of Gaza.
As David Rose writes in Vanity Fair, "The exact thing both Israel and the US Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah's arms and ammunition - including the Egyptian guns supplied under the covert US-Arab aid program."
For 15 years, critics of such expenditures have been labeled "anti-peace," but that tag just served as an excuse for whitewashes of misbehavior by first Arafat, and now Abbas.
An anonymous US official told JTA that the 1,100 PA gunmen currently in Jordan, at American expense and with Israeli permission, are being schooled in such things as "training in riot control, human rights, and effective arrests and defensive shooting." But so were their predecessors. Left unanswered in this account is why reasonable people should think this group will behave any differently.
THE ALTERNATIVES to Abbas are frightful. He is both weak and probably not much less ill-intentioned than Hamas, but he and his loyalists are seen as a counterforce to Iran's allies.
Should American supporters of Israel therefore feel obligated to support the continued flow of funds to PA sources?
The problem is, the peace processors have painted themselves into a corner. Having coronated first Arafat and now Abbas, they are forced to ignore or suppress the truth about them in order to maintain American support for a two-state solution.
At the same time, Israel's government takes the position that it needs a Palestinian partner who at least pays lip service to peace, as Abbas does. And no one here wants to do anything that would help create a greater Hamasistan. Yet experience shows that the realpolitik strategy of propping up Fatah has neither undermined Hamas, nor promoted peace. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is the recognition that it's time to stop reinforcing failure.
America's attempts to create a Palestinian peace partner have failed.
No amount of money will buy us a moderate state that will accept peace with Israel if the Palestinians don't want one. If the president and the secretary of state aren't honest enough to admit this, then perhaps it's appropriate to ask Congress to turn off the spigot that sends more of our tax dollars down a Palestinian drain.
The writer is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. jtobin@jewishexponent.com
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