Saturday, 29, April, 2006 (01, Rabi` al-Thani, 1427)
Editorial: Funding for Palestine
29 April 2006
A couple of months ago, after Hamas won the Palestinian general election and the US and the EU threatened to cut off aid because of their opposition to its policies, Hamas boldly predicted that it would find the money elsewhere. For a short while it looked as if it might actually happen. The Russians promised aid, so did Iran; Syria proposed an Arab fund; the Arab League said that Arab and Muslim governments could make up the difference. In the event, whatever funds may have been sent have amounted to almost nothing. The Palestinian state is now in precisely the crisis that President Mahmoud Abbas predicted. Some 165,000 Palestinian government-employees have not been paid salaries for weeks and have to beg and borrow to survive.
The knock-on effect is no less disastrous. Doctors, teachers, policemen and all the others who are on the government's payroll - the Palestinian Authority is the largest employer in the West Bank and Gaza - cannot pay their bills or anyone they employ, such as cleaners and the like. The economy is in dire straits.
Doubtless there will be many Arabs, Muslims and friends of the Palestinians incandescent with rage at the notion that the Americans and Europeans should be able to "blackmail" the Hamas government. But far more appalling is that the Palestinian Authority should have become so totally dependent on Western aid. That's asking for trouble - and trouble is what they have now that he who does not like the tune has stopped paying the piper.
The lesson that the Palestinians need to take from this disaster is that aid they take must have a much broader base. They cannot allow themselves to ever again slide into a state of neocolonial economic dependency on the US and EU. It is bad politics and it is bad economics. Not that they had much option. By default, Arabs and Muslim governments are also complicit in this disaster. Their insufficient giving is what has forced the Palestinians into near absolute dependence on Western aid. Moral support is all very well, but it does not pay salaries or feed mouths.
The absence of brotherly Arab help has already forced President Mahmoud Abbas - the only man doing anything serious about the crisis - to go, cap in hand, back to the Europeans for funds. His talks in Paris with President Chirac may have unlocked a door, but the outcome is far from satisfactory and is going to take too much time. The French president's proposal for the World Bank to take over responsibility for paying Palestinian salaries is a diminution of Palestinian sovereignty - in the same league as the idea that Jerusalem be internationalized.
The onus is on Arab and Muslim governments. They have to make some fairly instant decisions. There has to be much more aid to the Palestinian Authority. It has to be counted not in millions of dollars, but hundred of millions. It is needed now, not in a few months. There is no time for donor conferences and special committees. Palestinians, who have learned the funding lesson the hard way, will not easily forgive a lack of Arab and Muslim action at this desperate time.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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