You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Palestinian Authority’ tag.
This essay was written by Hadar Sela and published in The Propagandist.
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the commencement of European Union contributions to the Palestinians. The EU has been UNRWA’s largest donor since 1971 and over the last decade has provided that organisation with almost one billion Euros. Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords in 1993 it has, in addition, been a major donor to that administration.
The numbers are truly staggering; the EU has pledged to provide 28.4 percent of the total humanitarian aid budget for 2011 – US $60,013,647 – making it the top contributor. That figure does not include donations from individual EU member countries or separate donations to shore up the PA budget. In 2010, EU contributions to the PA budget as set out in the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan amounted to 199.90 million Euros. Funds donated by member states of the EU amounted to an additional 62.70 million Euros.
When combined with the additional donations from the World Bank, the United States, Japan and the notably less significant , the total amounts of money donated (US $3.96 billion in 2009-2010) mean that the Palestinians are still the highest per capita recipients of aid in the world, even 18 years after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
As Europe sinks ever deeper into financial turmoil itself, taxpayers in EU countries must be asking themselves if the tax money paid both directly to their own governments and indirectly to the EU could not be better employed in reviving their own economies and supporting unemployed and poverty-stricken residents of the EU. They may also be wondering if their 40 years of investment in UNRWA and 18 years of investment in the Palestinian Authority have actually brought any benefit to the Palestinian people. After all, throwing money at an investment which yields no returns is not financially savvy.
Not only has EU and other investment in UNRWA not solved the problem of Palestinian refugees, it has actually perpetuated it by forcibly keeping second, third and even fourth generations in permanent statelessness.
Read the rest of the essay, here.
PA minister Issa Karake handing the family of terrorist Abbas Al-Sayid an honorary plaque from the PA. (March 28)
The Palestinian Authority has just honored Abbas Al-Sayid, the terrorist responsible for planning the ‘Passover Massacre’ which claimed the lives of 30 innocent Israeli citizens (including some Holocaust survivors) and injured 140 attending a Passover meal at Netanya’s Park Hotel on March 27, 2002.
On March 28, Issa Karake, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs, visited the family of the Hamas suicide-bomb mastermind (who’s serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison), awarding them with an official, festive plaque, in celebration of the anniversary of the massacre.
On that fateful day in 2002, a terrorist walked into the dining room of the hotel, in the center of the city, and detonated an explosive device. The terrorist was identified as Abdel-Basset Odeh, a member of the Hamas Iz a Din al-Kassam Brigades, from the West Bank city of Tulkarem, which is just 10 kilometers east of Netanya. He was on the list of wanted terrorists Israel had requested be arrested.
Here are the victims of the attack. You can click on their name to learn more.
Palestinian Media Watch has consistently documented that honoring terrorists is an integral part of PA policy.
While in Ramallah on Thursday I noticed a public square which seemed dedicated to someone with a terrorist affiliation, and took this photo of the sign marking the site.
Sure enough, a friend who’s fluent in Arabic confirmed that the sign (in a prominent retail district) says:
Field Commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade in Ramallah
Commander Ayman Rateb Jabarin
who became a martyr on June 22, 2006
Of course, this isn’t the first public square in Ramallah to be named after a terrorist. Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the most lethal terror attacks in Israel’s history, was also memorialized in the city as a hero by the Palestinian Authority.
This is cross-posted from This Ongoing War
Wherever there are Jews, you will find them being introspective today. It’s the eve of the Jewish New Year, a time for trying to understand what this year just ending has meant to us. Also what we want in the year about to start unfolding.
As bereaved parents, thoughts of what terror and its exponents do to people’s lives are never far from the surface. On days like today, they are right at the top of the pile.
Our lives and those of our children – and we imagine the lives of many of our neighbours and friends too, but there we speak with far less familiarity – are permanently changed in the wake of the murder of our Malki. The extent of the impact naturally varies in both extent and nature. But it’s there.
The idea that there are people who can harbor a hatred so profound that they will happily die in their own man-made explosion just so long as they know they killed some of the people they hate (us), is incomprehensible. The more you think about it, the more impossible it is to understand.
But not for everyone.
The Palestinian Authority sat down, via its highest representatives, in Washington this past week to talk peace with representatives of Israel. A little earlier (as reported in the PA’s official newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Aug. 28, 2010 and via the invaluable Palestinian Media Watch) other representatives of the same Mahmoud Abbas PA regime bestowed a public honour on a woman called Um Youssef Hamid a resident of the Al-Amari neighbourhood of Ramalla, the seat of Abbas’s PLO-dominated government.
Knowing about this honour, about Mrs Um Youssef Hamid and the values she has inculcated in her offspring and, by extension, the values that the political leadership of the Palestinians seeks to inculcate in their society, is – to say the least – illuminating. The sort of insight that might contribute hugely to one’s introspection.
We don’t know more about Mrs Um Youssef Hamid than what the handful of news reports – until now, all of them Israeli since this event is evidently of no interest to the wider ranks of the global media – can tell us. Here’s what they tell us.
Mrs Um Youssef Hamid was honoured in a special ceremony (depicted on this Hebrew-language Israeli news site) by the Minister for Prisoners Affairs in the PA government based in Ramallah, the part of the Palestinian Arab polity not yet controlled by Hamas, and his senior officials. She was honoured because her sons were responsible for dozens (dozens!) of attacks on Israelis, the overwhelming majority of them on civilians. The sort of attacks that we call terrorist. The sort of cold-blooded and deliberate terrorist attacks that took the lives of more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, including the life of our fifteen year-old daughter Malki.
The sons of Mrs Um Youssef Hamid brought tremendous honour on her, on her family, on her people and on the Mahmoud Abbas regime. Nasser Abu-Hamid killed 7 Israelis and tried to murder 12 more. Today he is in an Israeli prison serving seven life sentences plus 50 years. The second son, Nasr Abu Hamid is serving 5 life sentences for his involvement in two terror attacks and arms dealing. Sharif Abu Hamid: 4 life sentences for involvement in several terror attacks and accompanying a jihadist bomber to a March 2002 attack. Muhammad Abu Hamid – serving 2 life sentences plus 30 years for involvement in multiple terror attacks. Rounding out the family’s distinctive specialness, a fifth son – Abed Almun’am Muhamed Yousef Naji Abu-Hamid – was apprehended and terminated by Israeli forces in a firefight in 1994 after carrying out several terrorist murders.
Enough. That’s them. Those are their values. What’s important for our society is to know against whom we are defending ourselves, and the ideas and ideology that motivate them.
We, for our part, and our neighbours and our society are driven to do acts of a very different sort. Our Malki’s death left an unfillable hole in our lives. For the past nine years, her family and friends have been engaged in creating an honour of an infinitely more constructive kind than the one we just described. It’s called Keren Malki, the Malki Foundation.
As we go into Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, this evening, we ask you to spend five minutes viewing a new video produced by Keren Malki UK, the London-based group of volunteers who are helping us communicate and support Keren Malki’s message of goodwill and good deeds.
Please click below to view the video, and please condider passing it along to your friends.
We don’t need ministers and ceremonies to articulate the values that animate the Jewish people and that run like a golden thread through three thousand years of Jewish history. All we need to do is remember lives like that of Malki, and the good that she embodied.
Shana tova! May this new year be a year of happiness, good health, peace and accomplishment for all people of goodwill.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Time to Put the Middle East Quartet Out to Pasture
December 8, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: European Union, Hadar Sela, MENA, Middle East Quartet, Palestinian Authority, Th Propagandist, United Nations | by Guest/Cross Post | 6 comments
The following was written by Hadar Sela & published at The Propagandist
The past twelve months have seen unpredicted political and social upheaval throughout the Middle East and North Africa and currently just about the only certainty is that there is still much more to come.
With the cards still very much in the air and last January’s confident assertions on the part of the various Middle East experts – who informed us that the two countries in which revolution would definitely not be taking place were Syria and Libya – still ringing in our ears almost as loudly as Hillary Clinton’s bizarre assurance that Bashar Assad was ‘a reformer’, only fools would try to predict how the MENA region might look in five years’ time.
What is clear, however, is that the general trend appears to be towards a rise in power on the part of religiously motivated political elements and a deepening of the Sunni-Shia sectarian rift which has long existed in the region, alongside real cause for worry about the futures of other minorities.
In this volatile climate and with the fate of existing peace treaties between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours far from guaranteed, the Middle East Quartet (comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States) is to meet next week in Jerusalem for another session of flogging the dead horse known as ‘the peace process’.
Amazingly, with the Palestinian Authority having trawled up every possible excuse for not renewing negotiations over the past three years, having opted to pursue the unilateral option at the United Nations, and with Hamas-Fatah reconciliation as much of a pipe-dream as ever, the Quartet is still promoting the anachronistic notion that a peace agreement can be reached by the end of 2012.
Read the rest of the essay, here.
Share this: