30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?

Europe's parliamentarians: Are they part of the problem or
part of the solution? [Image Source]

An incisive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal places much-needed focus on the role played by Europe's national and multi-lateral institutions in enabling the capacity of Hamas' inner circle to keep doing the massive harm they do. Here's the full text:

How Europe's Good Intentions Harm Gaza
By GERALD M. STEINBERG

In response to the latest outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas, European leaders have issued the familiar calls for peace and made the usual four-hour pilgrimages to the region. Yet little has come out of this European engagement, with the Continent remaining "a payer, not a player" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If anything, the war between Hamas and the Jewish state can in part be blamed on the massive and unaccountable aid Europeans have poured into the Palestinian territories. The European Union and its 28 member states continue to channel millions of euros, pounds and kroner annually to both Hamas-controlled Gaza and the West Bank, without responsible supervision, transparency or oversight.

In Gaza, instead of building schools and developing a functioning economy, Hamas diverted resources into the two main local "industries": acquiring thousands of missiles and building a huge underground infrastructure designed to terrorize Israeli civilians. The miles of concrete-lined strategic tunneling under houses, schools and hospitals are estimated to have cost €1 billion, which wouldn't have been available without European aid.

The EU's Court of Auditors issued a detailed evaluation of aid to the Palestinians in December 2013. Yet the contributions to the war industry were noticeably missing. The report discussed the EU's project for private-sector reconstruction in Gaza, which pays for buildings "destroyed or damaged during the Israeli 'Operation Cast Lead' offensive of 2008." But there was no mention of the role of these structures as facades for the underground maze. Auditors visited Shifa hospital in Gaza City, but their report doesn't mention the concrete bunkers below the emergency room, which house a Hamas military command center, according to Israeli officials.

By contrast, the report repeated the standard EU slogans condemning Israel for trying to protect its citizens from Hamas attacks, writing that "restrictions on Gaza are particularly severe." Framing the conflict this way promotes the Palestinian-victimization narrative, which is then translated into intense pressure on the Jewish state to relax restrictions. When Israel accedes to such demands, Hamas accelerates its acquisition of thousands of missiles and the transformation of Gaza into an underground terror fortress.

Many of these policy blunders are closely linked to political nongovernmental organizations that Brussels funds and turns to for "expert" advice. Israeli "human-rights" groups, such as Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and B'Tselem, are close EU partners. In public statements to international bodies and in their press releases, these groups frequently condemn Israeli policies but ignore the war crimes of Hamas.

Similarly, Europe has been a central source of funds to United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, which for six decades has helped to perpetuate the conflict by treating generations of Palestinians as "refugees." Unrwa facilities, like the rest of Gaza, are closely integrated into the Hamas war structure. On two occasions during the current conflict, deadly missiles have been found in Unrwa schools. Unrwa reported turning them over to "local authorities," which according to Israeli officials means Hamas.

Chris Gunness, UNRWA's spokesman, frequently echoes Hamas messaging in the mainstream media, and European officials then amplify his talking points in their capitals. His Twitter account and interviews are replete with indictments of Israeli actions in Gaza, but his condemnations of Hamas rocketing of Israeli civilians are muted, if they are issued at all.

Many individual Western European states have also inadvertently empowered extremism. The Dutch government, for example, has provided at least €300,000 to the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation. The Christian aid group is a major funder of Electronic Intifada, an anti-Israel website notorious for its rejectionist stance toward Israel's right to exist. Electronic Intifada's founder, Ali Abunimah, routinely uses inflammatory, ugly rhetoric against the Jewish state, labeling Gaza, among other things, a "ghetto for surplus non-Jews" in a 2010 tweet.

When Europeans finally find the courage to conduct full, independent and credible investigations of these policies, the reports will make tragic reading. This could take some time. The European Parliament in 2004 ordered the EU's Anti-Fraud Office to investigate previous funding for Yasser Arafat. A decade later, that report remains top secret—a blatant affront to democratic principles.

Before European statements can be taken seriously in this conflict, Brussels must become a more responsible player by keeping closer watch over whom and what it funds.

Mr. Steinberg is president of NGO Monitor and a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University.

10-Dec-13: EU may have located the billions it "lost" in Palestine. Or not.

[Image Source]

Some weeks ago, we wrote here about financial corruption and how it impacts on people's lives in the worst way. See "13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!". We followed it up with a second piece: "7-Nov-13: A principled effort to stop foreign aid being stolen? Probably not.")

Both referred to a report in the October 13, 2013 edition of the London Times:

£1.95bn EU aid lost in Palestine Times, London | Bojan Pancevski, Brussels | Published: 13 October 2013 | Billions of euros in European aid to the Palestinians may have been misspent, squandered or lost to corruption, according to a damning report by the European Court of Auditors, the Luxembourg-based watchdog. Brussels transferred more than £1.95bn to the occupied territories between 2008 and 2012 but had little control over how it was spent, the auditors say in an unpublished report seen by The Sunday Times. EU investigators who visited sites in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank noted “significant shortcomings” in the management of funds sent to Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU. A spokesman for the court declined to comment.

Not exactly the kind of reporting that causes our hearts to sing. The passive language of that Times of London headline was outrageous, of course. Two billion pounds lost? Were they dropped, forgotten, mislaid?

Inspiring motto: the auditors are guarding
European taxpayers' hard-earned money.
A pity this is the first audit of the torrent
of EU funding to the Palestinians in 13 years.
Still, better late than never...

Obviously not. We noted then and numerous times in the past seven years of blogging here that European funding of the Palestinian Arabs is a story of ongoing massive malfeasance, as the article itself suggests. The influence that money on that scale has on active, ongoing terrorism and incitement to terror is clear to anyone who wants to see. (We provided some details at "10-Nov-13: Who finances those savage acts of terror? And why is this so poorly understood?")

We exchanged a flurry of emails with the press officer of the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg in October. Turned out that despite the confident language of the London Times reporter (whose response we have not managed to get), the audit report into the colossal Palestinian scandal had in fact not been published, and still has not. Other than to say that

A report touching on aid to the PA should be published toward the end of the year

the agency's lips were sealed about it at the time. But that's about to change. 

Everyone who pays the smallest attention to what is known about Arafat, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority understands that the taint and smell of financial impropriety hangs heavy in the air. Yet despite this, the last time an audit into EU funding of the Palestinians was done was... 13 years ago. 

Patten, Arafat, Prodi, Shaath

Given the effect on human lives, that's simply incomprehensible. And almost entirely un-noticed or unremarked by the mainstream news media.

We're hoping there have been no behind-the-scenes manipulations underway to minimize the political fallout of another Palestinian Arab foreign aid scandal. Stranger things have been known to happen (see "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"). 

Will the as-yet-unreleased report about billions having disappeared in the darkness of the Palestinian regime's private parts be buried or detoothed? Tomorrow, in Brussels, we may find out. 

An EU announcement says:

Since 2008, the EU’s largest programme in the occupied Palestinian territory has been PEGASE Direct Financial Support (DFS), which provided approximately €1 billion in funding from 2008 to 2012. This European Court of Auditors performance audit examined if the Commission and the European External Action Service had managed this programme well for that period. PEGASE DFS seeks to help the Palestinian Authority to meet its obligations to civil servants, pensioners and vulnerable families, maintain essential public services and improve public finances. The main conclusions and recommendations of the report will be presented to the press by Mr Hans Gustaf Wessberg (SE) the Member of the Court responsible for the report.

It happens at 10:30 am, Western Europe time, tomorrow, Wednesday. There will be live video coverage via the European Commission Audiovisual Service here. We're told from Brussels this morning that the video will archived for on-demand review afterwards.

We're hoping some enterprising journalists will press for post-report reactions from the likes of Baron Patten of Barnes and former PA prime minister and finance minister Salam Fayyad, each of whom have played a key role in the giving, the taking and the massive opacity that has accompanied the process from the outset.

We're a little less optimistic that members of the Yasser Arafat family will share what they know about those missing millions. But perhaps someone from the EU's OLAF office will step forward and fill in some of the missing details.

UPDATE Tuesday night, December 10: See "10-Dec-13: In Brussels, is the EU preparing to whitewash PA corruption?"

6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen

Don't be offended. But if you're a European who cares about what's being done with the taxes you pay to your government, the Palestinians are playing you for a fool. Not just you alone, but also your government, your politicians and your public-sector watchdogs.

Four years ago, when a hot terror war here in Israel was at its peak with innocent civilians being killed and maimed daily, the European Parliament started an investigation into whether European money was funding the actions of the murderers and savages on our streets. 

We ourselves are parents of a child who was murdered in a 2001 terrorist outrage, one of the hundreds of Palestinian Arab and jihadist bombings that have afflicted Israeli society. So we personally paid close attention when the Europarliamentarians began looking into their own civil service and its actions.

The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU government. During that period (2002 and 2003), Christopher Patten, a smooth, slick and utterly arrogant professional politician presided over an official European Commission program of sending huge sums of money into the maw of the Arafat kleptocracy, while denying eloquently out of both sides of his mouth that anything, Heaven forfend, might be wrong with any of this.

We never for a moment expected the European civil service to police itself in a legitimate way. And in this, we were not disappointed. We also never fell for Patten's manouveurings and chicanery, though most politicians and commentators clearly did. 

For a contrary viewpoint, and some precious insights into how Europeans have had their goodwill and good sense hijacked by the naked ambitions of their own ill-informed politicians, we suggest you pay an occasional visit to the website of the Funding for Peace Coalition. It's one of the very few sources of analysis of the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme and information that manages to see European venality and corruption for what it is.

The culmination of that carefully stage-managed Euro self-examination was that a secret investigation by its internal watchdog, OLAF, ended with a strange sort of whitewash to the Patten-managed terror funding of the Palestinian administration. Strange, because while the headlines of the OLAF audit said "we found no problem", OLAF's report itself - for the handful of people who bothered to read it - said there was no reason to think that everything was kosher, and in fact there were serious problems with the way European money was finding its way from Brussels into the hands of the murderers of Jewish babies and the killers of teenagers like our daughter.

At about the same time, the International Monetary Fund carried out its own audit. Its specialists found poor control mechanisms inside Palestinian government, huge sums 'diverted', rampant corruption and vast numbers of salaried jobs for people who did absolutely nothing (especially in the so-called 'security' arms of the PA.) How surprised, truly, are you to know that in the 2½ years since that IMF report, the payroll of PA employees has grown by a further 35,000?

In 2005, matters got expensively worse when Mahmoud Abbas, who had stepped into Arafat's greasy sandals, quietly incorporated the gunmen of the Fatah-controlled Al-Aksa Brigades into the PA, and assured them a monthly salary from the PA's payroll. 

Thousands more "security" individuals were added to the bloated payroll earlier this year just before the Palestinian Legislative Council elections which were won by Hamas. At about the same time, Abbas pushed through a wage increase (between 13% and 20%) for his "civil service" - essentially a majority of the Palestinian households, since many of the jobs are bogus.

The IMF criticized the move as a "substantial breach of the wage bill containment plan". The World Bank said: "The PA has created a serious fiscal crisis for itself with salary expenditure essentially out of control". [Source: Nigel Roberts, the World Bank's Country Director for the West Bank and Gaza]

The polite, formal objections by international bodies go on. But the money has kept pouring into Palestinian Arab hands since then. Arafat's beaming widow ended up with the mother of all nest-eggs after collecting a million euros a month while her husband was still in charge. And the luxurious villas of Fatah chieftains continue to be erected on the fringes of Ramallah and Gaza City for the insiders.

But for the ordinary man, woman and child on the littered streets of Palestinian Arab settlements, life remains a bitch. Despite the largest, most sustained program of foreign aid in the history of mankind, Palestinian Arab life, for far too many, continues to be lived inside garbage cans and slums. The money, most of it European, did not disappear, as people frequently erroneously say. It simply reached the hands of the Palestinian Arab insiders who - for generations - have built personal fortunes by controlling its kleptocracy. And there it stays, as it traditionally has. (See "Arafat's Swiss Bank Account", a personal memoir by Issam Abu Issa, former chairman of the Palestine International Bank.)

In a September 2006 analysis called "EU plans restarting PA aid: Risk of funding terrorism unresolved" published on the euFunding website, Brad Nielson writes about the publication by Die Zeit, a serious German news magazine, of an investigative report in 2002, detailing EU support of corruption and violence against innocent civilians. The response of the European Commission was derisory, but as Neilson points out, the EC made a commitment that: 

If any evidence comes to light that the PA is knowingly employing members of terrorist organisations, the PA will need to act immediately to take these people off the payroll and bring them to justice.

The evidence was available then. New evidence keeps emerging. 

So the Eurocrats leaned on the Palestinian Arabs to "act immediately", right? Of course not right. (Are you dreaming?) Then, as now, the bureaucrats of the European Commission chose to ignore the information in front of their eyes, pushing ahead with spending more and more and more European taxpayers money on failed Palestinian systems, on catastrophic Palestinian leadership, on known Palestinian terror channels. All this in direct contradiction of its own EU laws and its own statements to the public and to the media. And though almost none of it improves Pal-Arab lives. it keeps going on and on.

And not only by the EU. Keep your mind focused on the hopeless, dire poverty that characterizes daily life on the Palestinian Arab street as you read the following news reports from yesterday:

U.S. Urging Bigger Force for Abbas | Steven Erlanger in the New York Times | The U.S. is proposing to expand the presidential guard of PA Chairman Abbas to 6,000 men from the current 3,500, as part of a $26 million plan to shore up Abbas' position, according to donors who have been briefed by Washington's security coordinator for the Palestinians... The estimate is that $20 million will go to equip the presidential guard and $2 million to expand it, with $4 million going to build a training facility in Gaza and to complete one that is being built in Jericho. [Erlanger's October 4, 2006 NYT article goes on]

The American funding mentioned here is for set-up costs. The source is private donors so that the US government can evade its own restrictive laws on funding terror. And once the deal is done, the monthly salaries for these new "presidential guards" will come from... where?

Just to be clear that Abbas is not the only Pal-Arab insider who knows how to sort out his guns-versus-medicine priorities, here's what his political rivals are doing:

Tunnels feed new Hamas army | Intelligence officials express worry over expanding Hamas forces, say confrontation with IDF soon to come | Alex Fishman (Yedioth Aharonot) Published: 10.05.06, 10:39 | The Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip has assembled an armed and trained force of about 7,500 fighters. A senior military official emphasized that it was not just a large guerrilla force, but an organized military force. This new Hamas army consists of several specialized units, including a short-range missile unit, a long-range missile unit, an anti-tank unit, and a sniper unit, among others. Intelligence sources estimated the army would reach operational capacity, and be capable of confronting the IDF as soon as the coming summer, if the flow of arms, military experts, and money into the Gaza Strip was not stopped. The army did not only have defensive capabilities against the IDF, but offensive capabilities that would allow it to launch long-range missiles towards settlements within the Green Line, and to infiltrate Israel through hidden tunnels. According to military sources, the strengthening of Hamas’ army was a calculated aspect of a long-term plan that began with the rise of the Hamas government, and did not cease for a single day since then. Even recent internal struggles and IDF operations did not hinder the moving forward of the plan... In September alone, 12 tunnels were discovered in a single kilometer near the Gaza Strip town of Dahaniya... It was difficult for Israel to make an exact estimate as to the number of working tunnels there were on the Philidelphi route, but a rough estimate showed several dozen tunnels which were sophisticated, professionally quarried, and fully equipped with tracks and wheeled carts.

For the dwindling ranks of hopelessly-pollyannish individuals who still think of Hamas as somehow less corrupt, more true to their people's interests and so on, than Arafat's and Abbas' Fatah, consider:

• In 2006, the number of government employees has steadily increased since Hamas took control of Gaza.
• This includes Hamas' new so-called "special operational force" of 3,000 gunmen, its members drawn from the Hamas-controlled Iz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades and from the Hamas-loyal Popular Resistance Committees (PRC). This new militia was originally headed by Jamal Abu Samhadana, a notorious terrorist who masterminded the 2003 bombing of several US diplomatic vehicles in Gaza, killing three Americans. Samhadana's brilliant career came to an abrupt end in June, but the armed militia continues on its way and continues to draw monthly salaries.
• President Abbas increased his own Presidential guard from 1,500 gunmen to 10,000 (no misprint - that's ten thousand).
• Despite the vast fortunes accumulated by individual Pal-Arab insiders over the past forty years, the current average personal income tax rate for Palestinians is - as it always has been - zero. Surprised? You ought to be. Despite the quiet desperation of the Palestinian Arab economy, no Palestinian Arabs currently pay income tax: not the billionaires, not the tycoons, not the monopolists. Zero.

So in light of all the mismanagement and absence of accountability and of transparency, European government money is going to be withheld from these kleptocrats and terrorists, right? 

Not right. As the invaluable Funding for Peace Coalition again points out, in a September 2006 article called "EU hints to PA: Accountability no longer required":

Europe has effectively signaled a readiness to hand over more money to the PA. And Europe has shown that it is not interested in receiving a commitment to previously agreed-upon financial reforms called for by the World Bank. Without proper controls, the European taxpayer will yet again lose his investment, with the average Palestinian's money being directed towards corruption and the war industry. [Funding for Peace Coalition]

At a time when the PA claims to be chronically unable to meet its payroll, are we allowed to ask about the prioritization process that allows failed politicians in Europe and in the Palestinian regime to push ahead with their lethal incompetence on the backs of Israeli and Palestinian victims?