It's All About the Money - January 7, 2002
For more than eight years, the world’s democracies have joined the Arab states in funding the Palestinian Authority, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in an effort to “improve the living conditions of the Palestinian people.”  In so doing, the world’s leading states, including the US, Russia, the G7, most European states, and the oil-rich states of the Arab world, have deliberately chosen to turn a blind eye to the real destination of the funds.

For the past eight years, and likely much longer, Yasser Arafat has enriched himself at the expense of the people he purports to represent.  Instead of using such funding for education, employment programs, social services, and improving the quality of life of his people, he has pocketed the entire sum, leaving the Palestinian people living in slum conditions, often without the basic necessities of life.

In such conditions, it has been easy for Arafat and his henchmen to incite the masses into hatred of the economically prosperous Israel.  Vital neighbourhoods can be glimpsed just over on the next hilltop.  The economy is among the strongest in the world.  New vehicles can be seen daily on the roads, and the State of Israel marches on.  It is no accident that the Intifada re-ignited in the very year that Israel experienced its strongest economic growth in history.

So with all the economic progress in Israel, where did the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to the Palestinians go?  Why are they not sharing in the wealth?

This past weekend provided the answer loud and clear.  The Israel Defense Forces captured a ship on the high seas bearing 50 tonnes of war materiel destined for Palestinian terror armories.  The Palestinian Authority purchased the boat for $400,000, according to Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, and sent it to Iran to pick up a cache of weaponry that astounded observers at yesterday’s news conference.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said the PA spent “hundreds of  millions of dollars” on the arms shipment. Prime Minister Sharon said that "Arafat chooses to buy long-range Katyusha rockets instead of investing in children's education. … When Arafat gave the orders to purchase the weapons discovered on the ship, he made a strategic choice - to bring about regional deterioration which would lead to war."

Think about that.  Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on weaponry that would have changed the structure of terror in Palestinian-controlled areas to one that no existing state has ever had to deal with.  All that money came from international aid given freely to Yasser Arafat, with no financial accountability attached to it.  If that money had been spent instead on the things it was meant for – infrastructure development, education, social services, and employment programs – there would have been no Intifada today, and there likely would have been a healthy and vibrant Palestinian state joining Israel in economic prosperity and progress.

But Yasser Arafat managed to pull off a stunning maneuver.  He convinced the world to give him such incredible sums of money and to dispense with any accountability measures.  After all, he needed to provide for his people, and with international supervisors looking over his shoulder, such provisions would be hampered.  He then pocketed the money, spending it on weapons to entrench his regime of terror.  He launched his Intifada in September 2000, and began working on his people, convincing them that Israel was the one to blame.  Then, as a final coup de grace, he showed the world the suffering of the Palestinian people, confined to their own villages out of security concerns and deprived of the pitiful salaries they earned in Israel.  More money was needed, he claimed, to alleviate their financial burdens, put food on the table and heat their homes.

And the world fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

To be sure, there were those in Israel, such as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who insisted that the money be handed over.  These were even responsible for having Israel contribute to the international financing effort.  But there were loud voices in Israel shouting the truth at every opportunity: that Arafat was pocketing the money so that he could finance a future war against Israel.  I don’t for one minute believe that the world is so incredibly naive that no one realized what was going on.

The inescapable conclusion, therefore, is that the donor countries who comprised the international aid efforts on behalf of the Palestinian Authority’s war machine are sponsors of the terrorism that currently plagues Israel.  They have provided the funding for such arms hauls as the one captured this weekend.  At the same time these nations talked of peace and overcoming the economic difficulties that led to terrorism, they financed Arafat’s war machine on the backs of the very Palestinian people they professed to help.

Prime Minister Sharon yesterday said that the Palestinian Authority was “infected with terrorism”.  He wasn’t exactly right.  The Palestinian Authority is the organism that causes the infection.  It is the rest of the world that is infected.  In today’s world, each country should be closely examining its foreign policy as it pertains to the Middle East, and its positions regarding the Palestinians.  Terror is no longer acceptible, nor is funding or supporting it.  So the world invokes.  But is this mantra actually true, or is it just pleasant window dressing to appease the Jewish victims of their criminal policies?

Copyright 2002.  All rights reserved.  Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel.  Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.