16-Jul-13: In the Arab world, growing awareness that the Palestinian Authority doesn't pay its bills. Are there lessons here about corruption?

Image Source: ArabianBusiness.com

We commented a few days ago ["11-Jul-13: Football and barefaced hypocrisy"] about the striking dissonance between (a) the endless needs of the Palestinian Arabs, real or self-inflicted or both, and their inability to address those needs by tapping into Arab fraternal solidarity (b) the endless, astronomically huge disposable wealth - virtually all of it from the fortunate location of subterranean fossil fuels within their territorial control - of various Arab polities, and notably Qatar.

Keep in mind, as you read the note below, two additional considerations of some importance:

One: Most (by far) of the money that goes to fund the relief and educational work of UNRWA for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs comes from non-Arabs. [See here for the evidence.]
Two: The Mahmoud Abbas regime, one of the two Palestinian Arab statelets, somehow manages to provide funds month after month to convicted Palestinian child-killers and other assorted thugs as part of an official, government-run terrorism-support scheme. [See "28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea."] They not only have as much money as they want for this sick, pathological purpose; they also defend it vociferously, as if they are masters of their own budgets, have covered all their expenses, and are free to apply money received from donors (which is the vast bulk of what they spend) on political featherbedding which they routinely deny when challenged.

Now consider the following short news report, published tonight by the independent, Bethlehem-based Palestinian Arab news agency, Maan [here]:

Private hospitals stop treating Palestinian military personnel| Updated 16/07/2013 21:08 | NABLUS (Ma'an) | Palestinian private hospitals on Monday stopped admitting Palestinian Authority military personnel because of the government's outstanding bills. The federation of private hospitals decided to start refusing treatment to patients referred by the PA's military medical services because their debt to hospitals reached 30 million shekels ($8.34 million), federation chief Dr Nitham Nijab said. Several hospitals announced that they could no longer afford to amass more debt, Najib told Ma'an, adding that some hospitals had not paid their employees for several months. Other hospitals have had to borrow from banks to meet their basic expenses, and suppliers have threatened to stop providing medicine and equipment, Nijab added. The PA's military medical services promised to transfer 10 million shekels ($2.87 million) and 150,000 Jordanian dinars ($212,000) to the federation of private hospitals several months ago but the money was not delivered, Nijab said.  On Tuesday, a network of fuel distributors announced that gas stations would stop letting the PA security forces fill up for free after the PA's finance ministry failed to pay their bills for five months.

It takes no especially great insight to point out, as we have been doing for years, the blatant hypocrisy that operates at multiple levels of the Palestinian Arab political hierarchies, both of them.

What endlessly puzzles us, however, is why smart people, good people, keep standing shoulder to shoulder, pocket book to pocket book, with the dangerously irresponsible, and often satanically evil, nitwits who hold the destiny of the Palestinian Arabs in their hands.

People, for instance, like the US government, as we pointed out in May 2012 and last month, just to give two among numerous other examples.

Abbas: Nothing to do with me [Image Source]

What is it that keeps those generally-rational European, American and other Western governments from taking a good close look at the naked violence and backwardness propagated by Abbas and Haniye and their inner-circle cronies and declaring the Palestinian Arab emperor to be embarrassingly naked?

And that's before we ask why they turn a perpetually blind eye to the larger-than-life corruption that is endemic to today's PA and Hamas, and to the PLO before them. And the failure of the fraternal Arab wealth-holders to live up to something remotely-close to their self-declared obligations.

There has to be a reasonable explanation.