The Palestinian Authority is up in arms about the new decision of the European Union to prohibit monetary aid to all PA-affiliated organizations and institutions if the PA doesn’t end its links to any organizations on an EU terrorist list. In a revealing response, 134 PA organizations, many involved in promoting the delegitimization and economic boycott of Israel, argued that some organizations on the EU terrorist list, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas, were essentially “political parties” and claiming that “the struggle against Israeli occupation” is not terrorism.
Chief Arab negotiator Saeb Erekat also sent an official letter to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell demanding that the new policy be reconsidered. He actually claimed that the new conditions represented an attempt to disrupt civilian Palestinian political activity and violated “Palestinian human rights as anchored in international law.”
So just consider: the Palestinian mantra is now officially and proudly that killing Israelis is merely political activity and entitled to all of the respect and protections accorded to other such worthy endeavors.
Of course, this sort of thing has been roundly rejected in the U.S. – most pointedly when, in 2018, the Taylor Force Act was enacted. It stopped much of American aid to the PA until it stopped paying stipends through the Palestinian Martyr’s Fund to imprisoned individuals who committed acts of terrorism and to the families of deceased terrorists. Still later, the U.S. cut virtually all of what was left after the PA justified the payments as a social security-like program.
It was surely time that the EU acknowledged that what the Palestinians are up to is the persistent, organized and intentional killing of civilians. One hopes, though, that the primitiveness of the PA assertion will not soon be dismissed. But we fear too many in the world share that crowd’s conception of political action when it comes to Jews.
