Lawmakers want to reduce or eliminate the $500 million a year in aid and security assistance the United States gives to the Palestinian Authority amid evidence that its leaders are inciting violence against Israelis.
While that might be satisfying in some ways, concerns that a cutoff would make the situation worse are likely to win out. Israeli officials oppose such a move, fearing that it may cause the Palestinian Authority to collapse.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2574118/
“Israel doesn’t want a collapse because it will collapse in Israel’s lap,” David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday.
Still, the problem of anti-semitic incitement in Palestinian society, much of it officially created and encouraged, remains a serious obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the basic conflict with Israel and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.
The issue is at the center of talks this week between Secretary of State John Kerry and leaders in the region, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordanian King Abdullah II.
“We have to stop incitement, we have to stop the violence. And I think it’s critical,” Kerry said before his meeting Thursday with Netanyahu in Berlin. He’s set to meet with Abbas and Abdullah on Saturday.
The Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday adopted a bipartisan resolution calling on Abbas to “discontinue all official incitement and exert influence to discourage anti-Israel and anti-semitic incitement in Palestinian civil society.”
It also directs the State Department to track and publicize incidents of incitement by Palestinian authorities.
But there’s a bipartisan desire in Congress for a more active U.S. approach to the problem. At a hearing before Thursday’s vote, experts gave lawmakers options besides an aid cutoff.
“The problem is we’ve been condemning incitement for decades but we never do anything about it.” said Elliott Abrams, a former top adviser in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, who argued for targeting the personal finances of Palestinian leaders who incite violence, and barring them from the United States.
Abbas “keeps doing it because he never pays a price for doing it,” Abrams said. “It’s a very cynical game. And as long as he pays no price, he’ll keep it up.”
He and others also suggested U.S. officials target the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is dominated by Abbas’ Fatah movement, by closing its office in Washington and cutting off funding to incitement activities.
The PLO is “a bloated and opaque organization that has consistently stymied democracy,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The United States also needs to think beyond the leadership of Abbas, who’s in the tenth year of a four-year term largely because there are no good alternatives to his rule, and nurture a new generation of Palestinian leaders, he said.
“Washington must hasten the orderly exit of Mahmoud Abbas,” he said, noting that the Palestinian leader, aside from having outlived his usefulness, is also 80 years old.
“The guy is a pack-a-day smoker, he’s not healthy. When he drops dead, we’re going to have problems,” Schanzer said.
