Everybody in the Biden administration is all juiced up to reward Hamas for attacking Israel by giving the Palestinians a state, one presumably run by the Palestinian Authority (PA). People who make this suggestion, who include Biden and his running dog Anthony Blinken, seen to be ignorant of the fact that the PA is a terror-promoting organization that in some ways is even worse than Hamas, for it produces schoolbooks that have brought up generations of Palestinians to hate and want to kill Jews.
If you want to know why neither Hamas nor the PA (nor even a revised version of the PA) should be running Gaza and the West Bank after the war, read the Tablet piece below, which is reasonably short and full of facts. The author, Gaudi Taub, is also a broadcaster, a screenwritere, and a historian. Click the headline; it’s a free read:
The title of the article is startling, but it is accurate. For the PA has placed a value on the stipend a terrorist will get depending on how many Jews he’s planned to hurt, actually hurt, or killed. And the more Jews you kill, the more money a jailed Palestinian gets, all through the “Martyr’s Fund” described in Wikipedia. (It’s often called “pay-for-slay”.) I and others have talked about it before, yet many people still seem surprised that it exists. Not only that, but it’s funded in part by American taxpayers (via fungible money we give to NGOs, which becomes extra money for the PA), and, if the terrorist is killed (and becomes a martyr, or shahid), the terrorist’s family gets a stipend for life.
Now if anything is genocide, a program whereby Palestinians are financially rewarded for killing Jews is that. Imagine if Jews got paid for each Palestinian they killed! The world would be outraged, and it would properly be called “genocide” (which Israel is not committing now).
The Martyr’s Fund takes up a huge portion of the PA;’s budget: about 7%, and according to Tablet ,the PA considers it the most important item in its budget, one that cannot ever be dispensed with. Below is a table of what dead Jews are worth to a jailed Palestinian; monthly stipends to prisoners (or their families) are calculated based on the time a terrorist is sentenced to jail. (A New Israeli Shekel is worth 27¢ U.S, so divide by about four to get the monthly salary in dollars.
The PA, as I said, also creates and promotes terrorism through its schools, producing materials that are also used in UN (UNRWA) schools:.
Schools are a critical part of the socialization of Palestinian children into this culture. Not only do Palestinian school books contain direct incitement in the form of explicit murderous antisemitic ideology, but also every subject, including grammar and math, drills the same message into children’s brains. Take the following exam questions that Shemesh cites (p. 20):
“Hamas shoots a rocket which weighs 50 kilos in the direction of occupied Tel Rabia [Tel Aviv], which is 90.25 kilometers away. What speed does it need to fly, what would be the maximum height, and how long will it take it get there?”
Or:
“Two people are carrying on their shoulders a coffin weighing 200 Newton in the funeral of a martyr weighing 800 Newton.” The students are asked to calculate the strength the two men would need.
. . . . In other words, the cult of death reigns everywhere you turn. Regardless of how much well-meaning Israelis tried desperately to imagine otherwise over the years, the Palestinian national ethos is built around a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Palestine, from the river to the sea, of Jewish presence.
Finally, the PA itself not only encourages terrorism, but also practices terrorism:
By now, moreover, we know that PA security forces personnel are directly involved in terror attacks. In fact, even as the press in Israel and in the West tries to ignore it, PA officials brag about their complicity in terrorism in Arabic to their own people. They cannot stand to lose their competition with Hamas in the national Jew-killing contest.
A Palestinian Media Watch report published in February, titled “Terrorists in Uniform,” quoted a PA spokesperson bragging that “roughly 63-65% of the number of Martyrs in the West Bank … are members of the Fatah Movement. And most of them are members of the [PA] Security Forces or their sons.” The police forces Israel armed and the U.S. military trains are active participants in the terror they were supposed to stop. Using the guns we gave them to stop terror, they instead kill Jews—in the process securing the livelihoods of their families.
There’s more, but just these three aspects of PA-induced terrorism should make Americans very wary of trying to have the organization help run a postwar government in Gaza—or any government ruling entities created in the now-impossible “two state solution. One of the morons who’s been roped into PA corral is Thomas Friedman of the NYT, who seems to have ignored this:
Regardless of this bloody track record, the White House and the State Department, along with pro-Democratic Party Israeli think tanks, former IDF generals nurtured on a woke ideological diet in American universities, and the Israeli press, are careful to maintain a conceptual barrier between Hamas as a terror organization, and the PA. The latter, they maintain, is a crucial partner in the fight against terrorism—the same PA that, in reality, glorifies and incentivizes terrorism.
The Tablet article ends eloquently:
Less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, the PA’s Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs included an infamous Hadith—a saying attributed in the tradition to the messenger of Islam—in its official guidelines that provided imams with talking points to use in their Oct. 20 Friday sermon in Palestinian mosques. The Hadith says that judgment day will only come after the believers have exterminated the Jews. On that day, it says, even rocks and trees will help in the cause of jihad. They will say, “Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him.”
This horrific image, nature itself partaking in ridding the world of the unnatural Jewish scourge, is even more jarring against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attack on the Nova nature festival, where partygoers attempted to hide behind rocks and bushes in the Negev desert to escape the slaughter.
The PA, the U.S. partner that Washington wants to put in charge of Gaza, has since added the families of the “martyrs,” the terrorists who were killed while committing the horrors of that terrible Shabbat morning, to the list of pay-for-slay beneficiaries.
Yes, the trees all say to come and kill the hiding Jews.
There is no two-state solution. Not when one party calls for the destruction of Israel from the river to the sea.
This is an excellent piece. I often read very good articles in Tablet. I have no idea how they are funded, but I’ve never run into a paywall.
Yesterday I attended (via Zoom) a forum on the war that featured a well known Israeli-American journalist, who has written extensively about Israel and quite a bit about the war. He thinks that Netanyahu needs to go.
I asked him two questions. The first was whether a different Israeli leader would prosecute (or will have prosecuted—past tense) the war any differently. He wasn’t sure, but thought that a different leader might have struck a different balance between destroying Hamas and providing aid to civilians. Maybe so, but I doubt that any Israeli leader could both leave Hamas in power and remain in power himself.
The second question I asked—spurred on by my having read the Tablet piece—was whether he thought that a “reconstituted” Palestinian Authority could really be a practical partner for peace. His answer was that in the past, while negotiations didn’t reach an endpoint of a peaceful solution, the they did bring the two sides closer.
My conclusion—even in talking with a seasoned student of Israel—is that a solution involving the Palestinian Authority is highly unlikely. History tells us that the roots of Hamas are intertwined with those of the PA itself, and that a PA moderate who can serve as a partner for a durable peace is nothing but a chimera.
Those of us who welcomed and even sanctified the Oslo agreements with the PLO have to admit, ruefully, that events have mostly validated criticisms of the Oslo “peace process” voiced at the time. The criticisms were expressed most cogently in Commentary magazine in the US—and in Israel, come to think of it, by members of Likud.
Honest and critical evaluation by those who were wrong of the reasons why that is so—if such widespread evaluation is even possible—might reveal contributing core assumptions that will, nevertheless, be deeply resistant to change. Perhaps it’s our fate as human beings.
Leaving the PA or HAMAS in charge of any Palestinian territories would be like the Allies in WWII leaving the Nazis in control of German government after the war.
The PA and Hamas are no better than ISIS or Nazis.
Until Palestinians rid themselves of the PA and Hamas, there ain’t going to be peace.
I do not understand why people particularly in the administration in the US and elsewhere have such short memories concerning Palestine. I have said it before and repeat it again, these are the very same people who danced with glee in the streets and burned American flags at the news of the death of thousands when the twin towers were destroyed in New York, 9-11. Just like October 7 2023.
Palestinians will never rid themselves of Islam never mind the PA and Hamas.
Never forget.