Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

Palestinians Put Terrorists on Payroll, with American Help

Published May 23, 2011

As Alana noted yesterday, President Barack Obama still seems to be waffling on Hamas, asserting in his AIPAC speech both that Israel can’t negotiate with a terrorist organization and that it must do so anyway. Yet really, why should he cavil at Hamas’s support for anti-Israel terror when the Palestinian Authority, to which the U.S. donates hundreds of millions of dollars a year, uses that money for the exact same purpose?

Last week, Palestinian Media Watch reported on a new PA law to grant a monthly salary plus various benefits to any Palestinian or Israeli Arab imprisoned in Israel on terrorism charges. The law was published in the official PA registry on April 13.

Lest anyone doubt that its purpose is specifically to reward people who murder Israelis, it creates a sliding scale under which prisoners serving longer sentences receive higher salaries. Since longer sentences obviously correlate to more serious crimes, that means the greater the crime, the greater the reward–a clear incentive to commit anti-Israel terror.

Starting from a base of NIS 1,400 (about $400) a month for prisoners serving up to three years, the salary gradually rises to NIS 8,000 for 20 to 25 years, NIS 10,000 for 25 to 30, and NIS 12,000 (about $3,450) for 30 years or more. Generally, only murderers get sentences of 20 years or more in Israel. Thus the reward for murdering Israelis is a salary 4.5 to 7 times higher than the average daily West Bank wage of NIS 77.

Prisoners who serve longer terms also receive greater benefits. For instance, serving at least five years–three for women–gives you free government health insurance and free university tuition when you get out. If you serve 20 years or more, all your children also get an 80% tuition discount.

As an extra fillip, the law seeks to encourage homegrown terror inside Israel by granting Israeli Arabs an additional monthly bonus of NIS 500 on top of the enticing salary. The NIS 8,000 given a 20-year prisoner is more than double Israel’s minimum wage.

But the crowning outrage was the PA’s response when asked about the new law by the Jerusalem Post. It’s nothing to get excited about, said the PA’s Ministry for Prisoner Affairs, because the PA has actually been paying salaries to convicted terrorists since 1994. All that’s changed over the past few years is that the PA, evidently flush with European and American cash, has raised these salaries several times.

In short, even as PA President Mahmoud Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad were charming the West with their verbal opposition to terror, they were simultaneously working to encourage it by offering greater and greater financial incentives to those who commit it.

Israel ought to state clearly that it can’t possibly negotiate with an entity that pays people to murder its citizens. And its allies in Congress ought to stop financing these murders by means of American aid to the PA.

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/23/palestinians-put-terrorists-on-payroll-with-american-help/
Posted in Uncategorized
Originally Published in:

Original Link:

Subscribe to Evelyn’s Mailing List

Featured Post

Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

Read more
Archives