Palestinian Prime Minister Calls Western Aid Cutoff ‘Blackmail’
JERUSALEM, April 8 - The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya, called a cutoff in foreign aid “blackmail” on Saturday and said that his government would not bow to international pressure and recognize Israel.
The American government made it clear that it would not support or fund a Palestinian government controlled by Hamas. No surprise there, since the American government officially considers Hamas a terrorist organization- which, for all intents and purposes, it is. So why all the weeping and gnashing of teeth when our government does exactly what it said it would do? Surely, the Hamas warlords who now control the Palestinian Authority couldn’t have been taken by surprise? Or is their feigned outrage and pathos merely for domestic consumption, so their highly propagandized constituents will understand who to blame when the Palestinian dream of independence and self-sufficiency begins furiously circling the drain?
Hey, with Our Glorious Leader’s never-ending War On Terror circling the globe, you can’t very well expect that we’re going to fund a government that views terror attacks against innocent Israeli non-combatants as a legitimate political tool, can you? And it’s not as if the American government is pulling the financial rug out from under everyday Palestinians. American humanitarian aid will continue, but infrastructre projects will not. Given the official American policy of not allowing it’s diplomats to have any official contact with Hamas officials, there is no way to continue funding infrastructure projects, since these require coordination with the Palestinian Authority.
“The attempts to strangle the government have one aim,” Mr. Haniya told reporters in Gaza City. “They will not extract political concessions from us that will harm the rights of the Palestinian people.
“This is a continuation of hasty decisions,” he added, “that will increase the suffering of the Palestinian people and provide cover for the Israeli occupation.”
On Friday, the United States and the European Union, the largest donor to the Palestinian Authority, announced that they were suspending all financial aid to the new Hamas-led government because they regard the Islamic fundamentalist party a terrorist organization.
Mr. Haniya told the first meeting of his new cabinet on Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority was out of money and in debt. The government needs about $150 million a month for salaries and operations.
In addition to the cutoff from the European Union, which gave about $600 million last year, and from the United States, Israel has stopped turning over the roughly $50 million a month it collected in taxes on behalf of the Palestinians, and Israeli banks are severing their ties with the Authority.
Hey, guess what, y’all? You made your bed; now you can damn well sleep in it. If you want to be a full-fledged member of the international community, you need to act like one. This means publicly foreswearing the use of terrorism as a political tool. It also means recongnizing the right of Israel to exist. Even if you continue to refuse to recognize Israel in the political sense, the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority must recognize the reality of Israel and commit to peacefully co-existing with the Jewish state. If they cannot see their way clear to taking these simple steps, then screw them. They can continue to stew in the poverty and the misery that is of their own creation.
It’s a simple choice- peaceful co-existence with Israel with the corresponding aid from foreign donors, or stick to their ideological guns and continue as the Third World hellhole devoid of a functional economy it currently is. The Palestinian Authority holds the key to it’s fate; I just wonder if it has the intelligence and the common sense to do the right thing by the Palestinian people. If past is prologue, I’m guessing the answer would have to be no.
