Another source of funding are international donor conferences, where multiple states pledge money to the Palestinian Authority. At the 2007 Paris Donor Conference, for example, where 7.7 billion was pledged to the Palestinian Authority, 11% of the pledges came from the US and Canada, 53% from Europe. A mere 20% from the Arab countries – much of which was never delivered. [See the World Bank report, “Implementing the Palestinian Reform and Development Agenda.”]
Last year, we complained bitterly about the powerful symbolism at work in this shabby affair:
The PA is chronically short of funds, and is perpetually requesting handouts. Yet it has sufficient disposable cash to make the decision this week to channel funds to the terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons. Evidently Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts have a sound understanding of the message they want to convey to their people, and how best to deliver it. It’s humiliating that we, victims of these convicted jihadist terrorists, parents of murdered children, have to raise our voices about this – and evidently we are alone in doing so. Where are the European, American and Australian voices of outrage at what is being done with taxpayer funded aid money, and in their names?
Allow us to ask again, as we did in May 2011: Where is the sense of shame on the part of those who sign the aid cheques to the Palestinian Arabs? Where is the fury of those voters in Western, aid-giving countries whose political representatives allow this to go on without so much as a whimper?
[Note this article has been edited from the original, which can be found at Frimet and Arnold Roth’s blog, This Ongoing War. JewishPress.com Opinion Editor Daniel Tauber contributed to this version of the report].