25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing

Abbas [Image Source: AP]

Someone has done some useful number-crunching to give up-to-date and stats-based proportion to the Palestinian Authority's blood-soaked Rewards for Terror scheme.

A paper published online yesterday, ["Palestinian Payments to Incarcerated Terrorists and Martyrs’ Families Rise in 2017", Yossi Kuperwasser - JCPA Institute for Contemporary Affairs, July 24, 2017] analyzes the PA's detailed budget for 2017.

Naturally, the "usual allocations for salaries to imprisoned and released terrorists" are there. So are the so-called "martyr" payments. They get transferred to the families of Palestinian Arabs killed or injured in what the PA disingenuously calls the “struggle against Zionism” - in reality, the decades-long Palestinian Arab terror campaign against Israelis and Jews.

How does the Palestinian Authority's economics management track record look when compared with say Israel's. Catastrophically might not be overstating it. Just three indicators point to the direction of things:

• In terms of GDP per capita (most recent published data, in US dollars), Israel produces $33,783 [2016 numbers]. The number for the PA is $1,997 [source]. Half a century ago, tiny Israel with almost zero natural resources, already had a GBP per capita about two and a half times what the PA has today.
• GDP growth: The PA's most recent data shows growth of 0.7 per cent. Israel's was 3.8 per cent. Inevitably the chasm is going to keep widening.
• According to the useful Nationmaster website, in 2012 terms (the latest comparison they offer). Israel's economy produced exports of $90.2 billion. That was 54 times larger than the PA's most recent exports. 

UNRWA school girl in Jerusalem explains why she and her friends
have to prepare for war. Your taxes at work. [Video source]

What are the PA's goals when they're not talking overt propaganda? How they spend their cash gives it away:

• The PA budget shows that salary payments to "incarcerated and released terrorists" this year will cost their economy $153.4 million. That's 13% more than it spent for the same thing in 2016.
• This will be somewhat hidden (hiding is a core PA regime skill) by being channeled to recipients via the Palestinian National Fund, the financial arm of the PLO. Israel designates the PNF as a terrorist organization. A cursory look at what it says about its own activities makes that sound pretty accurate. This recent analysis says the PNF, a by-word for massive Palestinian Arab corruption, is now controlled by Mahmoud Abbas. It's one of the key sources of his political power.
• Those payments via the PNF used to be made directly by the PA until that provided to be too much of a political liability. The switch to the PNF was made overnight is mainly cosmetic.
• Payments to "families of those killed or wounded in the struggle against Zionism" are going to rise this fiscal year to about US$ 193 million. 
• Taken together, those two expenditure categories (living terrorists, families of dead terrorists) amount to an outlay of US$ 344 million just for 2017. The Kuperwasser paper says that's 7% of the total PA budget.
• It's also just under half of all the foreign aid the PA expects to get this year. You don't need to be an economist to understand how much more could done - in the positive, life-affirming sense - with foreign aid than what the Palestinian Arabs do.
• Then there's this: "The amount of welfare support per family under the poverty-line is much smaller than salaries provided to terrorists and their families..." So being poor - which is a result of pretty much everything the Abbas regime does for its people - is less of a challenge than fighting more and killing more. 

That the PA stands squarely behind its terrorists and their terrorism is beyond doubt. Palestinian law calls them - the people who break into kitchens of pizzerias and murder by knives and exploding guitar cases - the “fighting sector” of Palestinian Arab society.

UNRWA education: Return on investment [Video source]

Kuperwasser points out:

This ongoing pattern stands in sharp contrast to the Palestinian commitments in the Oslo Accords and to international law and conventions. It also reflects the fact that until now, no real pressure has been put on the Palestinians to stop the payments.

This might change soon if the US legislates into law the Taylor Force Act which is currently before Congress.

But the US is not the only country providing aid to the Abbas regime (one-half of every dollar, euro and or shekel of which goes into the appalling Rewards for Terror pot. Here are some others [via this source]:

• During the 2006–2007 period, main bilateral donors to the PA were the US, Japan, Canada, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Spain and France
• In addition, the two major non-bilateral donors were UNRWA and the EU (through the European Commission). 
• "From 2000 the European Union had provided over €1.6 billion to UNRWA... In 2013 UNRWA received $294m from the US, $216.4 million from the EU, $151.6 million from Saudi Arabia, $93.7 million from Sweden, $54.4 million from Germany, $53 million from Norway, $34.6 million from Japan, $28.8 million from Switzerland, $23.3 million from Australia, $22.4 million from the Netherlands, $20 million from Denmark, $18.6 million from Kuwait, $17 million from France, $12.3 million from Italy, $10.7 million from Belgium as well as $10.3 million from all other countries, totaling just over $1 billion in 2013.

Unlike most other aspects of the thuggish violence practiced by Fatah, the PLO and their cohort, the evil done via the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme [click here for more of our posts about it] is enabled - funded and perpetuated - by ordinary tax-payers in (mainly) Europe and North America and the faceless government bureaucrats who silently sign the wire transfers behind closed doors.

There are efforts to slow it down or defeat it - see "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look" and "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad". But as the current PA budget shows, neither the cashflow nor the enthusiasm of its stewards show signs of diminished ardour.

30-Jun-16: About the knives of the Palestinian Arabs (please pass this along)

If there were a way to have this video clip seen by everyone on all sides of the conflict who might benefit from it, the world would be a far, far better place - for us Israelis and our children, for the Palestinian Arabs and theirs, and for children everywhere.



Thank you, Lenny Ben David.

In respectful memory of a thirteen year old Jewish girl stabbed to death in her bed this morning at the hands of a jihad-minded assailant with a head full of the incitement depicted above. And in support of the heart-broken parents for whom an unwanted long journey starts today.

29-Feb-16: Unmasking what's driving those blood-lusting lone-wolf attackers

A caricature that has recently gone viral in Arab society:
"I carry in my womb the martyr-to-be"

Here's how the executive summary of a powerful cluster of analytical essays ["The Knife and the Message: The Roots of the New Palestinian Uprising"] published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs ends:

Israel will learn and adapt to this new situation as it has done in the past. The question is whether the Palestinian leadership will do the same and come around to understanding that the monster they have created, a generation of children led to believe in the culture of death, is not in their own best interest. Israel can control the damage, but only Fatah and the PA can end it, and it is they, the Palestinian leadership, who have to do so if the path to negotiation and conciliation is to be opened again, and this endless and senseless wave of violence extinguished.

It's one of the most important critiques of what's going wrong in this part of the world that most people will have read.

Please delve into it, and share it as widely as you can - particularly if you have friendly relations with journalists, reporters and editors. And if you care for the welfare of other people's children and our shared futures.