Why Is Germany Giving $117 Million — Or Any Aid At All — to the Palestinians?

Germany has just now signed an agreement with the P.A.’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, according to which Berlin has pledged that $117 million will be provided to the rulers of the P.A. sitting in Ramallah, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, as “investment” in unspecified “vital projects” (presumably, infrastrucure projects fo bring such necessities as water and electricity to the P.A.-run territories in the West Bank). Abbas, who during decades of his own corrupt rule has accumulated a fortune of $400 million, no doubt is rubbing his hands In glee at the prospect of those $117 million coming from Berlin. Should he take a million as his cut? Or two million, given how expensive his grandsons’ schools have turned out to be? A report on this agreement is here.

Germany and the Palestinian Authority have signed a €100 million ($117 million) cooperation agreement that will see German investment in areas under PA control. The deal was signed on Friday [Sept. 17], in Ramallah, the seat of the PA government.

The German donation aims to finance “vital projects” in the West Bank, ruled by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as in the Gaza Strip, controlled by the Hamas terrorist group.

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It’s not clear how much of the total of $117 million the P.A. will let through to its archrival Hamas in the Gaza Strip, or whether it will find a way to circumvent Hamas altogether, and pay for projects directly. It’s the same problem Qatar is wrestling with: how to provide aid for the people of Gaza without letting Hamas get its hands on it first.

The donation will finance “sustainable economic development in [Palestine] over the next two years,” according to PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh.

Following the conclusion of the annual Palestinian-German government negotiations, Palestine and Germany signed yesterday a bilateral development cooperation agreement, worth €100 million, to contribute to sustainable economic development in #Palestine over the next two years.

Shtayyeh thanks Berlin and the people of Germany for their “generous and continuous support and commitment” to the Palestinian cause, saying, “We hope our friends in Germany, the European Union and the international community will help put pressure on Israel to allow elections to be held in all the Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.”

Germany was not offering a “commitment” to the “Palestinian cause,” as Shtayyeh tries to make it seem. Berlin is merely offering aid for “sustainable economic development,” not political support for the Palestinian war on the Jewish state. And that economic aid, $117 million to be invested in projects over two years, is most modest by current standards.

Mohammed Shtayyeh deserves the highest Palestinian honor: the Saeb Erekat Medal for the Higher Hypocrisy. For what else can we call his remark about wanting Israel to “allow elections” to be held “in all the Palestinian territories”? If memory serves, it was earlier this year that all the elections in the Palestinian territories were called off, not by Israel, but by Mahmoud Abbas himself, once he realized that he would lose the presidency and his Fatah faction would also do poorly in the parliamentary elections. Although Abbas claims that he called off the elections because Israel would not allow Palestinians in east Jerusalem to vote, the Israelis made clear at the time that they had no objections to the Palestinians living in east Jerusalem voting in the Palestinian elections, as long as they cast their votes just outside the city limits. And Mohammed Shtayyeh knows that very well. Since he’s raised the little matter of elections, let’s remind him that his boss, Mahmoud Abbas, who is now in the sixteenth year of his four-year term as president, was never prevented from holding elections by Israel.

The 85-year-old Abbas was elected for a four-year term in 2005 but has been skirting around elections, calling them off repeatedly. The PA was slated to hold presidential and parliamentary elections in June, but Abbas again called them off, blaming Israel.

The last Palestinian elections were held in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006, when Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the parliament. In 2007, the terrorist group usurped control of Gaza via a military coup, forcing Abbas and his Fatah supporters out of the enclave and effectively splitting the Palestinian Authority into two political entities.

Germany’s representative to Ramallah Oliver Owcza praised the bilateral relations between his country and the Palestinians, reiterating German support for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He also stressed that Germany supports for [sic] holding elections in the PA and respecting human rights and public freedoms.

If Germany is interested in “respecting human rights,” does It include, among those rights, the right of Israel’s Jews to live free from terrorism? And if Germany does recognize that right, why is it now giving funds to the P.A., which through its “Pay-For-Slay” Program provides generous stipends to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of dead terrorists, which both rewards past, and incentivizes future, acts of terrorism? Why didn’t Germany make, as a condition of receiving this aid, the P.A. ending the “Pay-for-Slay” Program? For that matter, why is Germany not demanding, as another condition of such aid, that the P.A. remove the murderous antisemitism in its schoolbooks? And why is Germany also giving money in Gaza to Hamas, which does not only, like the P.A., support terrorism, but is itself a terror group, with a charter calling for the destruction of the Jewish state?

Does Germany not feel a special responsibility to prevent Hamas’ genocidal dream from coming true? At the very least, shouldn’t Germany cease giving aid, whether to the Fast Jihadists of Hamas or to the Slow Jihadists of the P.A.? Even if this $117 million is intended to pay for “vital projects” that are presumably peaceful, since money is fungible, that aid frees up other sums to pay for weapons that can be used to harm the Jewish state. Perhaps it’s time to remind the Germans of those unpleasant events that occurred within living memory, and that should make Germany feel a special responsibility to help ensure the survival of Israel, and certainly not to provide aid to the enemies of the tiny Jewish state, not now, not next year, not ever.

Muslim leader the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini and Adolph Hitler.
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