Getting Paid to Kill Jews

Topics:

Palestinians

It is by now no secret that the Palestinian Authority uses large portions of the international financial aid it receives to provide salaries and other payouts to terrorists who kill Jews. 

But a fresh investigation by journalist Edwin Black has revealed that this is not some automatic, blind welfare system, but rather a very deliberate effort to reward those who have chosen the path of violence, and therefore encourage others to do the same.

America today contributes about $400 million a year in direct financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, and another $400 in other assistance and investments. The European Union provides a similar amount.

In 2011, Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch spoke before the US Congress to explain how this money was being cynically used to encourage the slaughter of Israeli Jews by paying healthy monthly salaries to those sitting in Israeli jails, or to the families of terrorists killed during successful attacks.

A year later, two Hamas operatives from the Gaza Strip admitted to an Israeli court that they had gotten into terrorism game in order to earn a decent living. Killing Jews, they said, was the best way to secure a good and steady income.

Last summer, Israel’s Knesset was shocked to learn that in 2012 the Palestinian Authority had paid no less than $150 million to jailed terrorists and their families. It was further revealed that these salaries were determined on a sliding scale according to the length of the terrorists’ sentence. In other words, the more Jews killed, the worse the sentence and the bigger the reward.

In the course of his research, Black successfully sued to gain access to previously court-sealed documents pertaining to cases heard before US courts.

Those documents revealed what Black called a “meticulous, exacting official process” in which Palestinian leaders all the way up to President Mahmoud Abbas were involved in the direct reward and encouragement of terrorism against Israel’s Jews.

One example from the documents details the case of a Palestinian Authority police officer who in 2002 participated in a number of terrorist attacks that left a total of 12 Israelis dead and many more wounded. Following his capture, Israel sentenced the officer to 13 life sentences.

The case was only reviewed in 2009, but the Palestinian Authority decided to retroactively compensate the terrorist policeman back to the time of his incarceration. He was even later given promotions and accompanying pay raises while sitting in an Israeli jail.

A second example involved a terrorist, also a member of the Palestinian Authority security forces, who was killed while carrying out an attack that left two Israelis dead on the streets of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Social Affairs subsequently determined that this terrorist, like many others, was “martyred while performing his national duty,” and that his closest living relative, his mother, would be compensated accordingly.

Black concluded by noting that “most taxpayers in donor countries have no idea that their well-intended money is actually financing the flames of terrorism.”