Palestinians Refuse Money from US, Forget Trump Stopped Giving Money to Them Long Ago
If you thought teams publicly announcing they would not go to the White House before they’d even been asked to go was an embarrassing move, hold on. Palestine just figuratively told all of them to hold its beer.
Palestinian Authority premier Rami Hamdallah wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo informing him that U.S. aid money was no longer wanted. The letter was a response to the United States passing a new law that addresses terrorism against the United States, reported Israel’s Arutz Sheva.
PA notifies US it will no longer accept aid, in protest of anti-terror funding law. Israel pushing for compromise to continue US aid to PA. https://t.co/aZGCXjU3we
— Uriel Ben Avraham (@Jerusalem2004) January 20, 2019
Hamdallah’s letter of protest falls a little flat in the face of the fact that the U.S. had already stopped sending a tremendous amount of aid to Palestine under the Taylor Force Act. The bill appeared as a rider in the omnibus spending bill in March 2018, reported The Times of Israel.
The aid was cut off because the Palestinian Authority was paying out “stipends for terror convicts and families of slain attackers.” However, that is not the only thing affecting aid to Palestine.
President Donald Trump’s administration has also enacted policy measures which have cut aid to Palestine, wrote Arutz Sheva. In December, US Ambassador David Friedman said that no U.S. money was going to the Palestinian Authority, with one small exception.
The United States was continuing its funding for “Israel’s security coordination with the Palestine Authority,” which was of benefit to Israel. This meant that the United States was taking action against Palestine while keeping its commitment to Israel.
In conjunction with that, the Taylor Act did also provide for some minor exceptions, reported The Daily Wire. The bill allows for “payments made to the East Jerusalem Hospital Network … assistance for wastewater projects not exceeding $5,000,000 in any one fiscal year; and … assistance for any other program, project, or activity that provides vaccinations to children not exceeding $500,000 in any one fiscal year.”
So, between the two, funding to the Palestinian Authority became almost nil. That could be seen as a reason for them to complain, but that wasn’t why.
What Hamdallah’s letter specified was the 2018 Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act. The ATCA was passed in October 2018 and was slated to become officially enforced on January 31, 2019, reported The Jerusalem Post.
The act allows for lawsuits to be filed against the Palestinian Authority if it accepts U.S. money and is then held “responsible for acts of terrorism against US citizens.” Hamdallah wrote that all U.S. money specified in the ATCA would be refused by the Palestinian Authority.
And he took it a step further noting that money from sources associated with the United States would also be refused. He wrote that if the money “is or may be provided directly, or indirectly by any third party, to any governmental Palestinian institution” it would not be accepted, reported the Jerusalem Post.
For some perspective, the Palestinian Authority had received more than half a billion dollars in aid from the United States in 2017. Now, the United States has already cut off “$231.5 million in bilateral economic assistance.”
In addition, another “$300 million that had been earmarked for Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency” was cut. The only thing left was “support for the PA security services,” which was already reported to have been financially minor.
So, the Palestinian Authority being denied a river of funds, and seeing only an occasional droplet by comparison, is them being essentially cut off from aid, for all intents and purposes. For them to then make some kind of stand by protesting the droplet is laughable.
And their stand centers around terrorism against the United States. If they don’t want the droplet anymore because they want to cover their backsides from lawsuits related to terrorism against the United States, they will be hard pressed to find a great deal of sympathy in America.
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