08-Jul-19: The BBC and Pay to Slay

Frimet and Arnold Roth with BBC's Yolande Knell

After several years of being below the media radar, we appeared on BBC News last week.

Its Middle East correspondent, Yolande Knell, prepared a report that examined how Israelis - in this case, the two of us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) view the Palestinian Authority's relentless program of incentive payments to imprisoned terrorists and to the families left behind by dead Palestinian Arab terrorists.

Being the BBC, the report then focused on how the same appalling payments are viewed within Palestinian Arab society. Or at least among that segment which benefits in a personal sense from those payments.

Note also - again, this being the BBC - that the word "terrorist" - is not mentioned once.

BBC_World_News-2019-06-28_12-14-16 from BBC Middle East on Vimeo.

There's a scene in this which shows a rent-a-crowd assembly of Palestinian Arabs, mostly women, holding up placards with the faces of 'prisoners' while telling the interviewer "we're all in  prison". One of those faces, unmentioned, belongs to a convicted killer for whom we have especially low regard. Read about him here: "18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?"

A related story by Ms Knell went to air on BBC radio some days earlier. We are heard in that too, but it has somewhat different content compared with the video. Click to hear it now.

We don't claim to be dispassionate observers. The Hamas savages responsible for executing the Sbarro pizzeria massacre in which our daughter Malki and fifteen other innocents were murdered in 2001 have collectively pulled in more than a million dollars in the years since their act of barbarism turned so many lives upside down. We provide the details here: "24-Aug-18: What aid funds handed to the Abbas regime ($1 million and growing) have done for savages who kill Jews".

The United States and the European Union are the major sources of the foreign aid cash that makes those Abbas payments possible. But Norway is prominent in the list as well as are the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

We have posted a stream of background pieces about their culpability and lack of good sense. For instance (and these are from four months of 2016 alone) -

• 27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad 
• 27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in 
• 28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?
• 31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme
• 02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror
• 04-May-16: The PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: Abbas, fobbing off Norwegian criticism, incriminates self
• 13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme 
• 25-May-16: Wall-to-wall agreement at last: The Pal Arab kleptocrats and the devastation they wreak
• 14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers

As we said, there are many others. Click on "Rewards for Terror" to see dozens more.

(Illness is the main reason why our posts have been so few these past two months. Hopefully, that's behind us now.)

09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

Image Source: "The Palestinian Dream"

Over at the Jerusalem Post this afternoon, there's an important summary of information placed before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this afternoon ["Palestinian Authority paid terrorists nearly $350 million in 2017", Lahav Harkov, January 9, 2018].

If you're not already familiar with them, the data are simply eye-popping. In a society where the average income is about US$580 per month, the PA regime headed by Mahmoud Abbas gives that sort of money to anyone sentenced by the Israeli court system to three to five years in prison.

But since serious terrorist offences often come with sentences stiffer than 3-5, it's worth understanding what those offenders get paid by their perennially-broke government and what other benefits they can expect to get.

• A terrorist sentenced to 20 years or more in prison is paid five times the average salary. It starts to flow while he or she is still in prison. And it then keeps coming - for the rest of the recipient's life. Does anyone think there might be some subtle message here about where the PA and Abbas are placing the emphasis in the vision they offer their citizens?
• Then the fine print: If the imprisoned terrorist holds Israeli citizenship (there were about 1.8 million such Arabs in 2017 according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, meaning they represent 20.8% of Israel's total population), then they qualify for a US$145 bonus.
• The sum paid each month by the PA for what the article calls "the most severe crimes" exceeds US$2,900 which is larger than the average Israeli income (currently about US$2,700 per month according to the article and about US$2,955 according to another source). 
• Being married gets a terrorist a further increment, and there are add-ons for each child parented by the convicted terrorist.
• There are also specific pay increases for (a) being married and (b) each child a terrorist parents.
• If and when the terrorist beneficiary of all this largess gets out of prison, the PA law entitles him or her to a prestigious civil service post in its government

And as we observed not long ago ["25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing"], it's all getting worse, not better. 

At various times, advocates for the Palestinian Arabs contend that this is nothing more than social welfare and the Israelis are making a big deal out of nothing. But that's not so: the fact that you get more money according to the severity of the crime and/or the length of the sentence means that the payments are there to encourage serious crime - the more serious the better. And as Palestinian Media Watch has pointed out, the PA defines the entitlement to these payments in terms that ensure PA salaries do not go to Palestinian Arabs convicted of crimes such as theft - who may very well be social welfare cases - but do go to terrorist murderers in the service of Hamas and Fatah. Further elaboration is really not needed: anyone taking a dispassionate look at the realities knows the PA scheme has one clear purpose, and it's not the alleviation of poverty.

From a recent US summary of the scheme's impact:

The PA spent an estimated $300 million last year, roughly seven percent of its total budget, on these payments to more than 30,000 terrorists and their families. It does so at the direct expense of helping provide a better future for its own citizens, and despite its heavy dependence on foreign aid for income. Much of that aid comes from the United States - an average of $335 million annually over the last five years. The lion’s share, roughly $280 million per year in that span, is economic assistance to cover the PA’s significant debts, freeing up funds for their “pay-to-slay” system. The issue has not gone unnoticed by Congress. ["Passing the Taylor Force Act will mark a vital step in the War on Terror", TheHill.com, November 15, 2017]

We also noticed. See "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look". And before that, we had posted dozens of reports and analyses [click here for more of them.)

The report delivered today to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, is part of the current efforts to create a new law that will deduct the total of what the PA pays its terrorists and their families from the taxes Israel collects and until now has handed across to the PA. There's more money at stake there than most people would guess. A July 2016 Reuters report estimated the scale of Israel-to-PA transfers at between US$130 and US$155 million per month. Translating this to annual figures, it's something between US$1.5 and US$1.9 billion.

The new Israeli bill, says the Jerusalem Post, "will likely go to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in three weeks, with a first reading in the Knesset in the ensuing days". It's said to be largely inspired by the Taylor Force Act, a United States law that will stop all US aid to the Palestinian Arabs as long as the PA keeps paying salaries to terrorists and their families. (Our take:
"11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money") The House of Representatives passed the bill in December 2017. It's now awaiting Senate approval.

The US is of course not the only state giving aid to the Abbas regime. Others include [according to this source] UNRWA and the EU through the European Commission [see "02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists"], Japan, Canada, Norway [see "02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror"], Germany, Sweden, Spain, France and the United Kingdom [see "14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers"].

The deep and corrosive damage on Arab lives and on ours depends on the unquestioning passivity of ordinary tax-payers of (mainly) Europe and North America, leading us to ask some years ago: "20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?" 

It also depends on much less innocent, faceless government bureaucrats who silently and with little-to-no publicity (especially to their own citizens) sign the wire transfers behind closed doors and pay next to no attention to how those funds are spent or what's done with them. Darkness, secrecy and deception [see "6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen"] have been part of the whole story pretty much from the outset.

25-Jun-17: Addressing Pal Arab society's addiction to terror: Small signs of hope?

Kushner and the US delegation with Abbas in Ramallah three days ago [Image Source]

If you haven't already seen it, may we direct your attention to a fine Ben Cohen analysis in The Algemeiner. dealing with reports from Palestinian Arab sources that PA President Mahmoud Abbas was reportedly “fuming” in the wake of a meeting in Ramallah this past Thursday with Jared Kushner in which the US side sharply criticized the notorious PA program of “martyr payments” to terrorists and their families, some $183 million annually in foreign aid funds.

A couple of excerpts in which our views get some airing:

“This is madness,” Arnold Roth — whose 15-year-old daughter, Malki, was murdered along with 14 other people when a suicide bomber struck the Sbarro pizza restaurant in downtown Jerusalem on August 9, 2001 — told The Algemeiner. “No progress towards peace will ever come if we tolerate the ongoing sanctification of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs,” Roth said... In recent weeks, the Trump administration has sent out mixed signals regarding its policy on the payments. But after Thursday’s meeting with Kushner, one PA official complained to Haaretz that Kushner and his team “sounded like (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s advisers and not as honest mediators.” ["No Peace Possible While Palestinian Authority ‘Sanctifies’ Terror, Israeli Victim Families Caution Top Trump Aides", Ben Cohen in Algemeiner, June 23, 2017]

And

Roth said that while he didn’t believe the PA would collapse because of pressure on its bureaucracy over the terror payments, that outcome would still be preferable to one where “we accept some ongoing level of deaths-by-murder among Israeli families, so that the PA can preserve what they regard as cultural imperatives.”
Kushner and Greenblatt “must impress on the PA side that overcoming their addiction to terror is an essential prerequisite, and perhaps the only one, to sitting down to horse trade,” Roth concluded. “After that, everything is possible.”

It's an article worth reading in full and sharing.

The tolerance by donor countries of the pathology that has the Palestinian Arabs in its grip is a strange thing, one that has gotten far too little attention over nearly two decades. We have focused a lot of thinking- and writing-time on this over the years this blog has appeared (click Rewards for Terror to see several dozen). And experienced a tremendous amount of frustration and anger at the inability of political leaders in Europe and the US - many of whom we have tackled personally and directly on the subject - to grasp how fundamental the matter is to peace and better lives for all concerned.

If the Trump administration is ready to address it forcefully and to stay the course, that would be a welcome change with positive consequences for the pursuit of peaceful relations in this area.

13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men

The Old City and Lions' Gate [Image Source]

At about 4 this morning (Monday) there was a slightly elevated police presence in Israel's capital city because in Jerusalem it's the festive day of Purim. (Everywhere else in the world celebrated Purim a day earlier.)

An Arab assailant managed to squeeze into an occupied and cramped guard booth adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem's Lions' Gate, armed with a large butcher knife. He embarked on a frenzied stabbing attack, injuring the two Border Guard police inside.

"One of the officers fought his way out of the guard booth, loaded his weapon and shot the assailant, police said. The assailant was shot and critically wounded during the attack. He later died of his injuries." [Times of Israel today]

The Border Guard men are recovering at Hadassah Medical Center's Ein Kerem hospital where they were rushed for emergency treatment, arriving there in stable and fully conscious condition according to a hospital spokesperson.

The assailant has been named in the Arab media as Ibrahim Mahmoud Mattar, described by Israel Police as a 25-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s notorious Jabel Mukaber neighborhood from which a significant number of Arab-on-Israeli shooters, rammers and stabbers have emerged in the past two years (click to see some relevant earlier posts).

The attacker's knife [Image Source: Foreign Ministry]

Ma'an News Agency, whose work is in large measure paid for by the mostly unwitting and increasingly unwilling taxpayers of several European countries, adopted its customary alternative-reality approach to reporting on Palestinian Arab terror, starting with the headline of its tendentious report: "Witnesses: Israeli police 'execute' Palestinian in Jerusalem over alleged attack":

Israeli police shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian near the Lion’s Gate entrance to occupied East Jerusalem's Old City early Monday morning over an alleged stabbing attack that left two Israeli police officers lightly and moderately injured. The slain man was identified as Ibrahim Mahmoud Matar, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood Jabal al-Mukabbir, located south of the Old City. The shooting happened ahead of the al-fajr (dawn) prayers, as worshipers were headed to Al-Aqsa Mosque inside the Old City. Witnesses told Ma'an they saw a dispute inside an Israeli police post located near Lion’s Gate, between an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian "who was carrying a stick.” Israeli police then forced the young man outside of the enclosure and “executed” him at point blank range with with four bullets, leading to his immediate death, witnesses said. Referring to the dispute that lead up to the shooting, eyewitnesses told Ma’an that Israeli police were “controlling the situation” and could have easily detained Matar without using lethal force... Following the killing, Israeli forces were heavily deployed in and around Lion’s Gate and prevented many Palestinians from reaching Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, with witnesses saying the lockdown lasted from 4:30 until 6:00 a.m. Later Monday morning, Israeli forces raided Matar’s home in Jabal al-Mukabbir and detained his brother, parents, and his uncle, according to locals and Israeli police.

A few words about the journalistic values on display here. We follow Ma'an's reporting more closely than most people. The reflexive use by its editors of the cowardly term "alleged" to describe most Arab-on-Israeli attacks is a constant. But the mostly outlandish claims of Arab so-called witnesses and their fanciful explanations for how knives and guns ended up in Arab hands are almost never termed "alleged". 

Taking Ma'an's Palestinian-Arab-centric reportage at face-value requires a prior commitment to a thoroughly partisan view of events. In war, that's not unusual or even in some ways unacceptable. What's outrageous is that none of this could be done without the massive ongoing funding its editors and managers have gotten since its inception in 2005 from Western sources. Most of that money is from governments which means from tax-payers. And while many of the government bureaucrats in Europe signing off on those cheques and foreign aid forms are ideologically comfortable with how the money they supply is spent, it's a certainty that many, probably most, of the people actually providing those funds have no such political leanings.

NGO-Monitor does first-rate, systematic work examining how government funding from the West often gets wasted and channeled into very dark places connected with the Arab/Israel conflict. You might want to know that it has a resource page [here] devoted to shining some light on the quiet funding that is Ma'an's life-blood. 

Most people don't realize, but NGO-Monitor documents this, that for years Ma'an - an outlet for news in several languages - has been the recipient of millions (dollars and Euros) in foreign aid. Initial funding came from the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands. 

Since then, the torrent has continued to arrive from (among others) the governments of Denmark, Sweden, the United States,  Switzerland, Netherlands, the European Union and the United Kingdom. Several human rights and humanitarian juggernauts, in particular Catholic Relief Services, UNESCO and most egregiously Save the Children, have found ways to justify sending some of their budget to the Bethlehem offices of the propaganda agency. Why donors accept this is a puzzle - assuming they know.

UPDATE Monday March 13, 2017 at 10:00 pm: Elder of Ziyon notices, on visiting Facebook, that

Naturally, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah is extolling him as a "martyr" and making sure that his act is viewed as a religious obligation. This is all to let the next terrorist know exactly how his acts will be honored.

Tragically, it usually plays out this way.

01-Mar-17: Washington may be launching a long-overdue assault on Abbas' lethal Rewards for Terror scheme

Abbas' Rewards for Terror scheme, chiefly and lavishly funded by the United States and the European Union, is said to hold a "sacred" position in today's Palestinian Arab public opinion. Time that changed. [Image Source: AP]

Money has always played an under-appreciated enabling role in the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, even as those doing the actual channeling to the terrorists have doggedly denied the connection.

Channeled is the right word because the actual money for this sort of funding is never coming from the facilitators' pockets. It always originates with ordinary, unwitting taxpayers. Those doing the allocating and delivering are invariably paid functionaries in a publicly-funded European, Australian or North American government office.

This is infuriating. We have been writing about it since before we started our blog. See for instance this June 2004 contribution by Arnold Roth to the website of EU Funding (mission: "An Independent Look at the Role of European Funding in the Middle East") in which he addresses the British political figure who headed the EU's foreign ministry at the time, Christopher Patten [for background, see our post "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"].

A news article had appeared earlier that day, providing what Roth called:

the clearest possible indication that Arafat and his regime have at all relevant times funded the Palestinian Arab militants. Not to mince words about it, this - for those who actually need such things - is "the smoking gun". It connects the PA to terrorism, and by extension, implicates the European Commission which has continued to shovel vast amounts of money into the very same PA pipeline against reams of evidence that to do so is to fund murder. Depending on how one looks at it, today's story is either a revelation, or a very, very good reason for you and your staff to pick up the phone and make some urgent calls.

Brussels, May 2001: Patten in the company of Yasser Arafat, 
Romano Prodi and Nabil Shaath [Image Source]

Naturally Christopher Patten (honored these days to be called Baron Patten of Barnes) never made that call.

Nor was he moved by an op-ed in Wall Street Journal that had appeared in September 2003 under the title "Blood, Money and Education", also written by Arnold Roth. (It's behind a WSJ paywall. Another version is archived here.) Or by an open letter delivered to Patten that same month and published here.

We began blogging here in 2006. About a hundred of our posts in the years since then are key-worded "Funding". It's continued to be one of major preoccupations.

Having lost a dearly-loved child to the satanic work of Hamas, and then watching in horror as the mastermind of the plot that took her life and the lives of fifteen other innocents walked free with a phenomenally fat pension made possible by US and European funding of the unspeakable Palestinian Authority, we more than most understand the extent of the evil that aggressively imbecilic management of so-called foreign aid funds can wreak on the lives of innocent people.

So no one should be surprised that we are delighting to learn today of new developments in the US government that, if carried through, will significantly reduce the evil, the imbecility and the lethal amorality exemplified by the Christopher Pattens of international relations and governance.

An Adam Kredo report in Washington Free Beacon yesterday says legislators in the House and Senate of the US Congress met yesterday (Tuesday) to introduce legislation

that would cut all U.S. funding to the Palestinian government, which has been criticized for providing financial incentives to terrorists who kill American and Israeli civilians. The White House signaled its support for the legislation in a vast departure from the Obama administration, which worked against similar efforts when in power... "The Palestinian Authority's use of its resources to provide material support for terrorism—indiscriminately targeted at American and Israeli civilians—is a grotesque example of how well-intentioned U.S. generosity can be turned against us," a senior White House official told the Free Beacon... "This legislation highlights practical steps the PA can take to demonstrate a real commitment to ending the vicious cycle of hatred and violence that has prevented the Palestinian people from the prosperity and security they could otherwise be enjoying," the official said... [WFB, February 28, 2017]

The effort is entirely led by Republicans: Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton in the Senate; Doug Lamborn and Lee Zeldin in the House of Representatives. A , R-N.Y., are carrying the companion legislation in the House. A CBS News report added that it is cosponsored in the Senate by Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, John Boozman, Ted Cruz, Richard Burr and John Thune: again all republicans.

Strikingly (at least to us), the Washington Examiner said yesterday that

only Republican lawmakers attended the press conference...

Kredo, quoting that unnamed White House official, writes that the new law seeks

to tighten the financial noose on the Palestinian government and force it to abandon its practice of paying terrorists, is a first step to reforming the notoriously corrupt government, the official said. "The new legislative effort... cuts off all U.S. aid to the Palestinians as a direct response to its longstanding policy of paying salaries to terrorists and supporting those imprisoned for terrorist attacks" "...We shouldn't allow killers and ruthless attackers to become recognized as martyrs in a system that we're part of," Blunt added... "Most Americans have no idea this is a problem," Graham said. "Not only are Israelis victims of this practice, Americans are victims of this practice. We're going to change this. We're going to get the Palestinian Authority's attention by withholding their money."

Did we mention that not a single Democrat attended the Congressional
press conference yesterday? [Image Source]

It's a scheme we have for years termed "Rewards for Terror".

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who has long backed similar efforts, told the Free Beacon it is long past due for Congress to take the lead on this effort now that Obama administration officials can no longer lead efforts to block it. "After eight years of the Obama administration, the U.S. must take long overdue action to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for incentivizing and rewarding acts of terrorism," Cruz told the Free Beacon. "Roughly $300 million annually is provided in monthly salaries and benefits to terrorists jailed in Israel, their families, and the families of those who died committing such horrific atrocities against Israeli and American citizens, including Taylor Force [we wrote about what was done to him here.] Enough is enough. We must stand up for victims of Palestinian terrorism. No more U.S. taxpayer dollars should be provided until the Palestinian leadership stops engaging in this heinous practice. The incitement and glorification of terrorism must end." ["Trump Admin, Congress Behind Effort to Cut U.S. Aid to Palestinians", Washington Free Beacon, February 28, 2017]

No one working the halls of power in Washington can honestly claim to be unaware. David Feith one of the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers [quoted in our post], wrote last year ["Your Tax Dollars Fund Palestinian Terror", August 11, 2016] that none of this could happen but for the willful blindness of governments, foremost among them the United States. What's needed, he wrote, is

a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... [since] the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016]

A fine op ed in the Wall Street Journal five weeks ago [and quoted in our post "29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?"] stated bluntly how US funding is central to the PA's loathsome scheming which an Arab source quoted in the same post called "sacred in Palestinian politics":

Over the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region, American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support acts of terror... ["Stop American Aid to the Palestinians Until the Terror Ceases", David Aufhauser and Sander Gerber, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017]

Efforts are underway in Europe - including the UK, Norway and possibly via the EC's own auditors - to curb the European Commission's ongoing funding of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme. But in terms of lives blighted and destroyed, such efforts and those of the Americans will be meaningless if they fail to block the blood lust of the Palestinian Authority's inner circle of enthusiastic murderers. Only stemming the flow of tax-payers' funds into their malevolent clutches can do that.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Waszyngton może rozpocząć atak na zabójczy system “Nagród za Terror” Abbasa – co należało dawno zrobić") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?

PA President Mahmoud Abbas meeting with US Secretary of
State John Kerry in Ramallah in November 2015 [Image Source]

The underhanded attempt, in the waning hours of the Obama administration, to ship $221 million to Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority, is now - surprisingly - on ice. 

As Associated Press reported on January 23, 2017

Officials say the Obama administration in its waning hours defied Republican opposition and quietly released $221 million to the Palestinian Authority that GOP members of Congress had been blocking. A State Department official and several congressional aides said the outgoing administration formally notified Congress it would spend the money Friday morning. The official said former Secretary of State John Kerry had informed some lawmakers of the move shortly before he left the State Department for the last time Thursday. 

Two days later, in a report jointly attributed to its Middle East analyst Avi Issacharoff and to AP, Times of Israel said the cash transfer had been stopped:

The Trump administration has informed the Palestinian Authority that it is freezing the transfer of $221 million which was quietly authorized by the Obama administration in its final hours on January 20, a senior Palestinian source has told The Times of Israel. US officials conveyed to PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah on Tuesday that the funds were not expected to be handed over in the immediate future, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. On Tuesday, the State Department said it was reviewing the last-minute decision by former secretary of state John Kerry to send the funds to the Palestinians despite objections to the transfer by congressional Republicans. The department said it would look at the payment and might make adjustments to ensure it comports with the Trump administration’s priorities... ["Palestinians say Obama’s last-minute $221 million payout frozen by Trump", Times of Israel, January 25, 2017]

To be clear, no one serious is saying the Palestinian Arabs don't need aid or shouldn't get it. (Without getting into the matter of their endemic and world-class corruption, anyone can see they have huge needs, massively wasted resources and a kleptocratic and vastly inadequate leadership. They ought to be getting help.) The problem is that foreign aid to the Palestinian Arab gets turned by them into something lethal and hideous.

We have devoted dozens of posts in this blog to the open scandal of European and United States funding of the terrorism-addicted Palestinian Authority whose payments program (click on Rewards for Terror to see them) for the benefit of convicted and imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorists is one of the major factors in ensuring the carnage and devastation continues.

Now (without denigrating the fine efforts of other commentators like PMW) there's a clear statement of how this works and why it should be stopped, via a well-crafted op ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region, American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support acts of terror... ["Stop American Aid to the Palestinians Until the Terror Ceases", David Aufhauser and Sander Gerber in the Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017]

Aufhauser and Gerber note that in authorizing the funds transfer, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry violated

an informal agreement with Congress not to do so... Lawmakers had good reason to oppose the transfer. Much like with the $400 million cash ransom paid to Iran last year, no meaningful effort was made to account for how the money was to be spent or to prevent it from being used to kill innocents. [WSJ again]

Does funding of the European and US kind bring about more acts of Palestinian Arab terror?

[T]here is no question that this is happening. First, the State Department has acknowledged the diversion in reports to Congress, as documented most recently in a Dec. 16, 2016, Congressional Research Service report... [M]oney is fungible, and it is sophistry to argue that funds provided for good deeds do not enable the bad deeds of the same political entity, particularly given the scarcity of resources. Second, the Palestinian Authority’s support for killing—such as the stabbing rampage that took the life of Taylor Force, a West Point graduate, in Jaffa, Israel, last March—is indisputable because it is codified in law. Statutes pledge to “martyr” families triple the income for life of the average salary in the West Bank, free tuition, health insurance and clothing allowances. So popular is the program of pensions for the maiming and killing of civilians that, according to its own 2016 budget, the Palestinian Authority dedicates more than 500 full-time civil servants to its administration, at a cost of around $315 million, or roughly 8% of the budget of the would-be Palestinian state... [WSJ again]

In another WSJ op ed last summer (quoted in our post "14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think"), the writer urges

a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016] 

Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the data above:

• Total US foreign aid funding to PA in past decade: $4 billion
• Percent of total PA budget that goes to PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: 8%
• The yield delivered up by the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: We define that to mean the number of people (Israelis or visitors to Israel) murdered in Palestinian Arab-on-Israeli terror in the decade between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2016 [data source]: 180.
• How much US foreign aid produced each dead terror victim? We compute that by taking the US dollar share of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme; then divide that by the number of victims: 8% x $4 billion / 180 = about US$1.8 million. That's the value of US foreign aid (unrealistically assuming only US foreign aid is funding the PA's scheme) attributable to each of the victims murdered in this past decade's Palestinian Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks.

(This quick calculation is meant to provoke discussion and serve as an indicator of how terribly wrong things have gone. But be aware that the assumption that the sole funder is the US is inaccurate. Europe gets "credit" for providing a large share of the funding for the scheme. If we had added European funding to the numbers, the value of foreign aid per dead Israeli victim would be far higher.)

Congressional ignorance is not part of the explanation for why this still goes on. In July 2016 (as we noted in "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look"), the US Congress' House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted hearings into how the Abbas regime's payments scheme works. It was was told that about a tenth of the PA's annual budget was spent on

"paying terrorists who attack Israelis and supporting their families... [T]he Palestinian Authority is investing $137.8 million this year in salaries to terrorists jailed in Israel and payments to the families of imprisoned terrorists or suicide bombers, in violation of the Oslo peace accords with Israel." ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", Eli Lake writing for Bloomberg July 1, 2016]

There's nothing especially sophisticated about how the PA hides the payment scheme. Dr Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI], described for committee members how

the PA transfers funds to terrorist prisoners in Israeli or their families using two Palestinian Liberation Organization funds. The financial support of these individuals is mandated by [Palestinian Arab] law. Prisoners must be provided a monthly salary ranging from $364 to over $3,000 during their detention, and salaries or jobs upon their release. Those who commit the most grievous attacks receive the most substantial monthly payments and are also entitled to jobs in the Palestinian Authority institution upon their release. ["Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists and Their Families $140 Million a Year", Morgan Chalfant in Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

Here's Eli Lake again:

One problem is that the payments to terrorists' families are exceedingly popular these days. Ziad Asali, the president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, told me that in recent years the media and politicians have elevated these payments to something "sacred in Palestinian politics." Asali said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and others are too weak to stop it. "This is where we find ourselves now. The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way," Asali said. "But I think nobody really has the stature and clout to confront these issues publicly." ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", Eli Lake for Bloomberg, July 1, 2016]

If Asali is referring to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs (which he seems to be doing), the numbers show he has it back to front. We explained that in a recent blog post based on a March 2016 Palestinian Arab poll of Palestinian Arabs:

60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks... We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. ["15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

It's gotten worse since then. In December 2016, that 60% figure indicating "in favor of armed attacks and a return to armed intifada" had risen to 62% [see "15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?"]

The Obama administration (as distinct from the Congress) paid no noticeable attention to the impact of its Palestinian Arab foreign aid on people's lives and deaths during its two terms. Now there's a new regime in Washington. Will they do better? Will the Europeans? 

A lot rides on the answers.

07-Oct-16: Haaretz: British foreign aid to the Palestinian Arabs is being delayed while the return on funding is investigated

From today's The Sun revelations [Source]

This might turn out to be a big deal. We're hoping.

As Haaretz reports this afternoon ["U.K. suspends aid to Palestinians over concern it reaches terrorists"]:

British government freezes transfer of 25 million pounds to the PA following complaints that money ends up with assailants who carried out attacks against Israel. | By Barak Ravid | Oct. 7, 2016 | 2:33 PM | The British government has decided to freeze a transfer of 25 million pounds – about a third of the annual aid money it grants the Palestinian Authority – due to concerns that such money had been passed to pay allowances to terrorists or their families.
According to the Sun newspaper [which we tweeted a few hours ago here], the recently appointed international development secretary, Priti Patel, has announced that the transfer of funds will be suspended until the conclusion of an investigation that was opened into the matter. Earlier this year, a number of right-wing parliament members complained to the British Foreign Ministry and International Development Department that British tax payers' money was transferred as aid to the PA's budget, and from there onwards as allowances to assailants who carried out attacks against Israel. Sources in the British Foreign Ministry told the Sun that aid to the Palestinian Authority will not stop, but that part of it will be suspended until the end of an investigation into the matter. According to the sources, chances are that the suspended aid will be delivered in 2017. “We are not stopping for the Palestinian Authority overall, just delaying it to a date when we know our money won’t be going to people who do nothing in return for it.”

In reality, as we have been writing here for years (for instance, "27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in"; and from five years earlier "1-Mar-11: Finally, some sanity on European funding of Palestinian Arab terror"), it's simply untrue that Palestinian Arabs engaged in, convicted of, and serving time for, terrorism have done "nothing in return for it". They have done terror.

And in doing that, they have produced a meaningful return on the PA's investment in a scheme we have repeatedly called Rewards for Terror. That scheme may be the single most impactful of the Palestinian Authority's various initiatives.

Let's hope the British investigation doesn't get hijacked along the way.

21-Sep-16: At the entrance to Alfei Menashe, another story involving a knife

View of Alfei Menashe a decade ago [Image Source]

Another bright, sunny, gorgeous morning in Israel. Another woman - we're guessing she's young but there are no published details yet - who assaulted Israeli security personnel with a knife. Guns were, of course, present and the young woman is now injured and (we're not sure since the facts are scant and fresh) getting the active help of Israeli first-responders and perhaps a hospital emergency room team.

The knifing attack happened at the entrance to the red-tiled-roof suburban community of Alfei Menashe on the eastern edge of the central Israel urban area radiating outwards from Tel Aviv. About seven thousand Israelis call the pleasant town home.

Based on past experience, it's unlikely there will be agreement between the Israeli media reports, which tend to the factual and the dry, and the Palestinian Arab media reports, which tends to highlight what they view as heroism, courage, selflessness. Either way, we can be certain even at this early stage that -

• She will not be the last knife attacker who launches a hopeless assault on Israelis. Perhaps not even the last one today.
• If she lives, she may spend years inside an Israeli prison cell. Whatever education she managed to acquire until this point in her life, along with friendships and skills, will be mostly wasted.
• If she dies, she will appear on posters for a few days and be acclaimed as a Palestinian Arab hero and martyr.
• Either way, her parents - if she has a husband, then perhaps he too - will be paid by the Mahmoud Abbas regime (which denies that it does this but it certainly does this) a monthly payment that will soon far exceed what senior employees in the essentially-bankrupt Palestinian Authority government are paid. We call this the Palestinian Arab Rewards for Terror scheme and we, along with more serious writers, have described its operation in detail and the way it gets funded. Short version: It's funded by the foreign aid grants made by the European Union, the United States, Sweden and numerous other Western governments to the PA while the politicians of those governments keep one eye completely closed and the other half-open so they can keep saying, as they have preposterously for years, "We know nothing about that."
• Eventually, whether she lives or dies, a sports-field or a beauty pageant may get named in her honor by the PA, reinforcing the message that she - meaning the knife she wielded and the hatred she expressed for Israelis in flinging herself into something close to suicide - represents exactly what Palestinian Arab society wants its loyal citizens to do. And especially its children.

None of this is meant to minimize the tragedy of a life used up and thrown away by the suited men who set the tone for the Palestinian Authority and the poor wretches whose lives they destroy daily. Despite the headline above, this morning's news is not about a knife. It's about people.

Nor is it meant to minimize the horror faced by thousands of Israelis who are deployed throughout the country to secure our bus stops, schools for the blind, pizzerias, supermarkets and public and private spaces from the lemmings and their heads filled by fantasies of glory, revenge, destruction and paradise. Thank heavens we have competent, fast-thinking, courageous security people who understand what they and we are facing.

Nor are we trying to make the case that things are especially awful here. This is a wonderful country and this is a delightful time of year.

And for readers in the United States, a reminder that while it's certainly distressing to see one terror attack after another and the massive disruptions they bring, we realize things are worrying for you too over there. Your headlines this morning are filled with reports of a man arrested for placing a New York City bomb that went off and another that did not four blocks away along with pipe bombs in Seaside Heights, NJ; plus another that exploded at a train station in Elizabeth NJ. And there's the Somali-American who stabbed nine people in St. Cloud, Minnesota on Saturday until stopped by an off-duty police officer who shot him dead.

These issues are not local. They are thoroughly global, and that's before we start noting here what's happening in Europe and Australia and across the Middle East.

Fifteen-plus years after 9/11 this is our emerging reality, an ongoing war, and we need to figure out how all of us - especially the political figures and the people who report on the news, those of us who worry about children and grandchildren, those of us who value human life and hate hatred, those of us sickened by families who allow and even encourage children to fall victim to the death-cult madness of the preachers and the presidents - are going to deal with it.

UPDATE Wednesday September 21, 2016 at 9:00 am: Not a bad guess. The "young woman" turns out, according to the Jerusalem Post, to be a fourteen year old Palestinian Arab girl, a child:

An initial investigation shows a 14-year-old Palestinian girl arrive to the Eliyahu checkpoint by foot carrying a bag. Checkpoint security ordered her to stop and fired warning shots in the air. The girl continued and was shot in the leg by security guards in order to stop her when she put her hand into her shirt. The girl was lightly wounded and treated at the scene and no Israeli injuries were initially reported. The checkpoint has been reopened to traffic. [Jerusalem Post, today]

And at 10:00 this morning from Times of Israel:

"Security guards at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who did not heed their calls to halt on Wednesday morning, in what appears to have been a suicide attempt, the Defense Ministry said. The incident was initially misreported as an attempted stabbing attack. However, upon searching her possessions, a sapper “did not find anything,” the ministry said in a statement. “The girl approached the vehicle crossing by foot, holding a bag,” arousing the suspicion of the security guards, the statement said. They “ordered her to stop and even fired warning shots into the air,” the ministry said, but when the teenager continued approaching despite the calls to halt, the guards “shot her in the legs in order to stop her.” During an initial investigation of the incident, the teenager said, “I came to die,” according to the ministry. The girl was lightly injured and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

 She's alive though it appears that's not the outcome this child wished for.

UPDATE Wednesday September 21, 2015 at 4:00 pm: Here's the Wall Street Journal's version - under the stark headline "Palestinian Shot, Wounded at Israeli Checkpoint" - of the extraordinary narrative about this morning's shooting of a child at an IDF security checkpoint:

Israeli security forces shot and wounded a Palestinian teenager on Wednesday after she refused to stop at a checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel, Israel’s Defense Ministry said. The ministry said the 13-year-old Palestinian wasn’t carrying a weapon and didn’t appear intent on attacking Israeli security forces as she neared the Eliyahu checkpoint. After she failed to heed orders to stop and several warning shots were fired, she was hit in the leg by a single bullet, it said. “I came here to die,” the ministry quoted the young woman as saying after she was shot and hospitalized.

What kind of processes, internal and external, could bring a child of that age to do that?

UPDATE Wednesday September 21, 2015 at 4:20 pm: Ma'an News Agency has two versions of what happened. In English [here], it's close to what we wrote above. In Arabic [here] the part about the child admitting she came to the security point "to die" is absent. The Arabic version gives the child's name as Aoasa Ramadan Musa, age 12, from Qalqilya.

08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look

Shell Game: Back in February 2013, the man on the left was
the PA's then Minister of Prisoners Affairs. He's boasting 
of the huge number of prisoners receiving guaranteed 
monthly salaries from the PA. [Source Video: PMW]

Eli Lake, writing for Bloomberg last week ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", July 1, 2016] says

Whoever said crime doesn't pay hasn't talked to the family of a Palestinian terrorist. For the Palestine Liberation Organization and the related Palestinian Authority, the killers of Jewish Israelis are considered "martyrs." And as such, their families are paid for the service these murderers have done for the Palestinian cause. [Bloomberg - Eli Lake]

A few days later, and in the wake of several especially shocking Arab-on-Israeli terrorist murders, the US Congress' House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted hearings into how that works. We're not claiming to be objective by-standers in the discussion: we know that all the members of the Hamas gang who bombed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 have been, and some still are, major takers of those payments.

The Committee was told on Wednesday that the Palestinian Arab government spends about a tenth of its annual budget

"paying terrorists who attack Israelis and supporting their families... [T]he Palestinian Authority is investing $137.8 million this year in salaries to terrorists jailed in Israel and payments to the families of imprisoned terrorists or suicide bombers, in violation of the Oslo peace accords with Israel."

Describing how the payments to Palestinian Arabs who have carried out murderous assaults on frequently-unarmed Israeli civilians are made - it's a process we call the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme - in recent months, Dr Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] told committee members that

the PA transfers funds to terrorist prisoners in Israeli or their families using two Palestinian Liberation Organization funds. The financial support of these individuals is mandated by [Palestinian Arab] law. Prisoners must be provided a monthly salary ranging from $364 to over $3,000 during their detention, and salaries or jobs upon their release. Those who commit the most grievous attacks receive the most substantial monthly payments and are also entitled to jobs in the Palestinian Authority institution upon their release. ["Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists and Their Families $140 Million a Year", Morgan Chalfant in Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

This is relevant to the stabbing, ramming and/or shooting attacks on Israelis by non-uniformed, seemingly random Palestinian Arabs that have come to be frequently termed in parts of the news media as the work of "lone-wolf" attackers. It's become a currently fashionable term. The chairman of the House committee turned his attention to that aspects and argued (as we have repeatedly done in this blog):

“These terrorists are not, in fact, lone rangers. They are not lone wolves,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), who chairs the committee, in opening remarks during the hearing. “Instead, these terrorists are the product of the programming done by the PA’s perverted culture that glorifies the willingness to die or to spend time in prison in pursuit of killing or maiming Israelis.” [Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

Roughly 250 such Arab-on-Israeli attacks have been carried out or attempted since the outbreak of the latest wave of extreme violence in October 2015. More than 30 Israeli lives have been lost, and dozens of Palestinian Arabs have been killed by Israeli police and security actions during and after them.

How does that "perverted culture" stay funded? It's a non-trivial question. Dr. Carmon, in the written testimony he filed in conjunction with his appearance before the committee, includes a revelation which is, not surprisingly, consistent with those we have published here in the past year. Let's call it the mechanics of the shell game, the one that the Abbas regime, and Mahmoud Abbas himself, use to hide the true nature of the PA payments:

[Mahmoud] Abbas issued a presidential order according to which the payments to prisoners would no longer be made by the PA's Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs. Instead, they would be disbursed by a PLO Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. The aim of this deliberately misleading move was to alleviate pressure on the PA by donor countries that do not wish their money to be channeled to support terrorism. However, the offices remained the same and the official in charge remained the same under a new job title. The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA. [Quoted in "Is U.S. Foreign Aid Funding Terrorists?", Josh Luckenbaugh for MRCTV, July 7, 2016]

What that reporter could have said but did not - and we will - is that this transparent blood-soaked fraud is fully understood and known to officials throughout the foreign ministries, and other parts of the governments, of all the Western nations who provide the funding. 

The United States and the European Union are the major sources of that cash, but Norway is prominent in the list as well and so are the UK, the Netherlands and Germany in their own right. We have written a stream of background pieces about it - for instance (and the list is much longer than these pieces) "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad"; "27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in"; "28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?"; "31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme"; "02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror"; "04-May-16: The PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: Abbas, fobbing off Norwegian criticism, incriminates self"; "13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme"; "25-May-16: Wall-to-wall agreement at last: The Pal Arab kleptocrats and the devastation they wreak"; and "14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers". 

As we said, there are many others.

In his appearance before Congress, Carmon called the PA scheme a “deliberately misleading move” to assuage concerns from donor countries worried about their money being funneled to terrorists.

“The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA,” Carmon told lawmakers. He said that countries who provide aid to Palestine, including the United States, are “complicit” in inciting terrorism because the Palestinian Authority uses foreign donations to subsidize terrorists and their families. By providing this support, the PA is encouraging terrorism in violation of its Oslo commitment. Furthermore, the PA has been using money granted by donor countries for this purpose, and by doing so, has made [the funders] complicit in encouraging terrorism as well,” Carmon said. [Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

We're not sure Dr Carmon's term "encouraging terrorism" is the best way to look at this. Numerous public opinion polls taken of their view on violence and terror and their utility consistently suggest that not much encouragement of the Palestinian Arabs is needed.

Eli Lake, in the article we mentioned above, describes efforts made by the US and Israel in particular to disincentivize Abbas' PA regime from continuing its Rewards for Terror Scheme. He writes:

One problem is that the payments to terrorists' families are exceedingly popular these days. Ziad Asali, the president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, told me that in recent years the media and politicians have elevated these payments to something "sacred in Palestinian politics." Asali said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and others are too weak to stop it. "This is where we find ourselves now. The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way," Asali said. "But I think nobody really has the stature and clout to confront these issues publicly."

Really? How great it would be if a statement like "The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way" were true.

But if Ziad Asali is referring to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs (which he seems to be doing), the numbers show he has it back to front. And we mean Arab numbers compiled by Arab pollsters. We explained that in a recent blog post:

In the March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks... We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. ["15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

So in the face of this, and the overwhelming support that lethal violence gets among the people we call our neighbors, what legal and financial steps make sense? And what does the Obama administration (as distinct from the Congress) say? And how about the Europeans?

It's a big subject. We will come back to it in the next few days.