Avi Benlolo: The West keeps subsidizing the Palestinian Authority's death culture

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Thousands of people attended Elan Ganeles’s funeral this week in Israel. They came from every sphere of Israeli society, representing an incredible level of social cohesion around the denunciation of Palestinian terrorism. Ganeles, 27, represented the epitome of modern Zionism. Raised a proud American Jew, his family belonged to Young Israel of West Hartford synagogue where he also attended modern Orthodox schools. Ultimately, he fell in love with Israel and enlisted and served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

His only crime for being murdered by a Palestinian terrorist was that he was Jewish. On his way to a close friend’s wedding, Ganeles was shot and killed as he was driving near the dead sea. As in the case of most Palestinian terror attacks, they simply wanted to murder a Jew. Any Jew.

Two days earlier, on Sunday, brothers Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19, were murdered as they drove through the West Bank Palestinian town of Huwara. For them too, their only crime driving through the town was that they were Jewish. Sadly, and despite the fact their parents called for unity amidst the pain, anger over the incident boiled over as religious Jews set fire to the town. This was the first ever such incident and it has been condemned by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and the international community.

Palestinian terrorism has destabilized the region for decades and now threatens to elicit direct people-to-people confrontations. Weeks before these murders, seven Israelis were murdered in front of a Jerusalem synagogue. In the last year alone, 29 Israelis were murdered in terror attacks, while the IDF reports it had prevented an additional 2,200. Shockingly, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement boasted on its Facebook page that this number is too low and that in fact, Palestinians perpetuated 7,200 attacks against Israeli targets in 2022. All this, says a new report on terrorism published Friday by The Abraham Global Peace Initiative (my foundation) is directly linked to western aid supporting Palestinian terror.

Prepared by Henry Kopel, a retired U.S. Federal Prosecutor and the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism and Defend Freedom, our report states that the spike in terrorism happens “in part because of, over $6 billion in U.S., Canada, and European Union aid given to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) since 2008. The PA invests a substantial share of its budget, and hence of this foreign aid, on inciting terrorism, on glorifying terrorism and on financially rewarding terrorism”.

Foreign nations that are funnelling money to the PA through UN agencies and other entities have Jewish blood on their hands. Despite the fact that the PA rewards terrorists for murders through the so-called pay-for-slay program, these three western entities have increased their allocations. Aside from breaking every moral and ethical code established by democracies when it comes to human rights, apparently it’s perfectly okay to compensate terrorism despite “blatant violation of several PA commitments to foreign aid donors, and in clear violation of US and EU conditions on such foreign aid” says our report.

Palestinian terrorists have no shame. They are strategically targeting our youth and our children. Just two weeks before the Ganeles and Yaniv murders, a terrorist rammed his car into a crowd of civilians standing at a Jerusalem bus stop killing another two brothers — Yaakov, 6, and Asher, 8, Pally. Alter Shlomo Liderman, 20, was the third victim who was also murdered in that incident.

Despite these heinous terror attacks, our report says that “according to the Congressional Research Service, the United States since 2008 has given the Palestinian Authority between $250 million and $500 million annually. Over that same period the United States also has given between $180 million and $390 million to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which administers the Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East. In total therefore, annual US aid to the Palestinians has ranged between $430 million and $890 million, or well in excess of half a billion each year.”

In other words, the West is subsidizing the Palestinian Authority to destabilize Israel (we are seeing this play out right now) by inculcating generations of Palestinian children to be venerated as “martyrs” for mass murders. How often do we see Palestinians handing out candy in their villages when a Jew is murdered? How often do we see PA leaders pay their respect to the “martyred” families? Or hear about streets being named after terrorists? This is the death-culture the west is supporting unabashedly.

More significantly, Israel’s lurch to the right and the resulting social turmoil we are witnessing right now in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a direct consequence of aid to the Palestinians. The very reason this government was elected with a substantial majority was because of increasing Palestinian terrorism. Israelis did not necessarily vote for Judicial reforms. They voted for security against the forces that are attempting to destabilize the country through Palestinian terrorism and incitement.

We believe that “the unfortunate but glaring reality here is this: Decades of negotiations, agreements, promises, warnings, moral appeals, and temporary aid suspensions all have done nothing to reduce or prevent the Palestinian Authority’s relentless commitment to inciting, glorifying, and financially rewarding acts of terrorism committed against innocent Israelis.” So long as this irresponsible behaviour continues, there will be more victims like Ganeles and the Yaniv and Pally brothers. G-d help us. May their memory be a blessing.

National Post

Avi Benlolo is the founding chairman and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.