Apr. 21, 2017

Stop Supporting Palestinian Terror – Elliott Abrams (National Review)

Since the “Middle East Peace Process” began in 1993 with the Oslo Accords, the U.S. has permitted the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to get away with fostering, celebrating, and honoring murder. It’s time to end this scandalous American policy and insist that the Palestinians meet standards we would apply to any other aid recipients anywhere else in the world.

Palestinian official bodies celebrate those who kill Israelis by naming streets, schools, and parks after them. The message to young Palestinians is clear: This is the behavior we honor and these are the models you should follow. Moreover, the PA and PLO pay money to those who commit crimes of violence against Israelis – and the greater the crime, the more you get paid.

There is a sliding scale, and the longer your sentence, the higher the stipend. Issa Abed Rabbo, who shot to death two Hebrew University students he found hiking, and Abu-Musa Atia, who used an axe to murder Isaac Rotenberg, an elderly Holocaust survivor, are getting $3,500 a month.

There is growing support in Congress for the Taylor Force Act, named after an American student and U.S. Army veteran who was murdered last year by a Palestinian terrorist. It would restrict funds “available for assistance for the West Bank and Gaza” unless the president certified that the PA was “taking credible steps to end acts of violence against Israeli citizens” and that it had “terminated payments for acts of terrorism against Israeli citizens.”

There will never be peace if generation after generation of Palestinian youth are reared to honor terrorists. The greatest barrier to peace is a Palestinian political culture that elevates violence against Israelis above any positive achievements.

Perhaps a majority of Palestinians would rather forgo the assistance than stop honoring terrorists like Taylor Force’s killer as “martyrs.” But we will have taken a stand; we will have made it clear that we find such conduct intolerable.

The writer is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

(Click on the article’s title to see the whole article…Ed.)