The Times of Israel reported on Tuesday that Palestinian Authority’s cabinet minister and veteran terrorist Ahmad Majdalani will head the new Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment, which PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas has announced will be in charge of all social welfare payments, including those to terrorists and their families.
Some media reports have claimed that terrorists will now receive payments only if they are in financial need, not according to the longstanding criteria of the length of their prison sentences (meaning, how many Jews they killed).
This is an obvious and outrageous ruse. Majdalani, the Palestinian Authority, and the terrorists will all be able to simply claim that because these terrorists are in jail, their families are in need.
The families of dead terrorists will say they are in need since their breadwinners are no longer alive. Of course, these terrorists are no longer alive because they either blew themselves up or were killed while attempting to commit murder.
Indeed, the fact that the new agency will be run by a veteran terrorist ensures that it will promote the needs of terrorists. The fox will be guarding the hen house.
Who is Majdalani? He is the leader of the terrorist Palestinian Popular Struggle Front. It has carried out numerous terrorist attacks over the years, including the mass shooting at El Al offices in Athens, Greece, murdering a 2-year-old Greek boy and wounding 14 other civilians; and the 1970 hijacking of Olympic Airways Flight 255. Majdalani has never expressed remorse for those attacks or compensated any of the victims.
The only way to truly end “pay-for-slay” is for the Palestinian Authority to announce that anybody who has engaged in violence against Israel is disqualified from any PA payments. That would demonstrate that the PA sincerely rejects terrorism. Anything less is a sham, which is designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community.
Most recently the Palestinian Authority has paid monthly cash stipends to the relatives of killers through Foundation for the Care of the Families of Martyrs. But payments like this made by various Palestinian organizations related to the PLO have existed for decades.
“PA’s Abbas ends programme of allowances to families of slain Palestinians,” read the Qatari-controlled Al Jazeera headline. The Reuters headline was worse: “Abbas risks Palestinian backlash over overhaul of prisoner payments” – as if Abbas is the victim. He’s not. Abbas and his co-conspirators incentivize the murder of Jews.
What must be remembered here is that Abbas and the PA are obligated by the Oslo Accords to both disarm and to outlaw terrorist groups, to extradite terrorists to Israel, and to halt all anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement. Everyone knows that the PA has never done any of this. While the Obama administration never acknowledged or protested these violations of Oslo, the first Trump administration demonstrated time and again that it knew full well that Abbas was up to. He has used official PA-controlled news media and schools to raise an entire generation of Palestinian Arabs to hate Jews and Israel. The U.S. government has recognized that PA coffers are used to pay salaries to convicted terrorists.
The first Trump administration’s suspension of most U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority was the right thing to do and the recent news that Abbas has “halted pay to slay” is recognition that they are very concerned with what the new Trump administration will do next.
At this time it is also worth noting that the Oslo Accords said nothing about a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin went out of his way at the time to emphasize that the Accords did not create a Palestinian state, but rather would create an experimental period in which it would be seen whether or not the Palestinians were genuinely ready to live in peace with Israel.
We know the answer. The Oslo process proved to be a complete failure, because Abbas and the Palestinian Authority violated it with impunity. The PA sponsored mass violence against Israel (anybody remember the Second Intifada?). The PA organized massive arms smuggling operations (anybody remember the tons of weapons aboard the Palestinian ship, the Karine A, that Israel captured in 2002?).
Let us also recall that according to Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority, in July 2019, doubled the monthly payments it was issuing to the terrorist mastermind behind the 2014 infamous kidnapping and brutal murder of teenagers Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Frenkel. The track record of payments to terrorists by Abbas is a long uninterrupted one.
Friends of Israel must be clear: Just as Hamas, and Palestine Islamic Jihad must be dismantled, so must all other organizations that pay terrorists to slaughter Jews.
