With the COVID-19 outbreak as an excuse, a group of 59 Democrat Members of Congress, led by Representative Debbie Dingell, are hoping to restore U.S. aid to Palestinians that President Trump summarily shut down in 2018.
In a letter to Kelly Craft, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Dingell implores the administration to rush available funds to the West Bank and Gaza “to address this deteriorating humanitarian situation.” She cites Gaza’s “significant deficiencies” in healthcare infrastructure and equipment to fight the virus, including only 90 ventilators available for a population of 2 million. Funds could be put “to instant use” if directed to 144 health-care clinics staffed by the United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), “now on the front lines in combating this pandemic.”
How could any American possibly object to such a compassionate suggestion, with the whole world facing this “unprecedented global health emergency”? It’s sure to sound like a great idea to everyone who’s grasp of the situation with Israel and the Palestinians came pre-packaged from the mainstream media, university professors, or Democrat talking points. For the rest of us who’ve spent more than 10 minutes examining the issue, Dingell’s letter is just one more example of how Democrats are using the pandemic to re-introduce all of their worst ideas.
And pouring U.S. taxpayer dollars into the West Bank and Gaza is one of America’s all-time worst ideas. For decades, most or all of those funds were swept up by kleptocrats, terrorists, or both, and never helped anyone but the crooks and murderers of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. The memo line on Uncle Sam’s checks may have said “humanitarian assistance,” but on arrival they were spent building attack tunnels under Israeli kindergartens, buying Iranian rockets meant to kill Jews, and paying for the palaces of Hamas billionaires in much pleasanter neighborhoods far from Gaza.
These were the reasons behind Trump’s decision to stop throwing good money after very, very bad. The same reasons are motivating Israel-haters Rasheda Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to join Dingell in trying to get the spigot turned back on.
It doesn’t make it better that Dingell says the money can be directed to UNRWA. This suggests the group are neutral peaceniks “working closely with host authorities and the World Health Organization.” That’s far from the reality. In spite of UNRWA’s pretend mission to help Arab refugees displaced by the Arabs’ losing war of annihilation against Israel in 1948, it was never the agency’s real purpose. “Resettling the Palestinians wasn’t the point,” Jonathan S. Tobin explained several years ago. “UNRWA exists to keep the Palestinians alive exactly where they are, so they can serve as justification for continued conflict with Israel.” Tobin begged the U.S. to cut off humanitarian aid to Palestinian authorities, because the “lion’s share” was ending up with UNRWA, “one of the most thoroughly politicized and terrorist-infiltrated organizations in the world.” It’s true UNRWA enjoys a close working relationship with Gaza’s “host authority,” Hamas, because they’re useful in Hamas’s genocidal plans for Israel:
Schools run by UNRWA have been caught promoting antisemitic material and anti-Jewish violence, and as CAMERA has documented, the organization’s staff has included actual operatives for terrorist groups.
As recently as December 23, 2019, UNRWA’s former longtime spokesman, Chris Gunness glorified the murder of Palestinian collaborators. In a bizarre and revealing tweet, Gunness posted a poem — later deleted — about “collaborators” twitching “as they hung in the air on the lamp posts that glistened in Palestine square.”
Nor should it be any surprise that the World Health Organization is a longtime water-carrier for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. WHO has always followed the biased UN line that the West Bank and Gaza are “occupied Palestinian territories,” routinely refers to the West Bank and Gaza as “Palestine,” and puts all the blame for the state of Palestinians’ lousy health care on Israel. WHO’s reports on the region never mention “the subverting of medical ambulances by terrorists, Hamas’ rejection of essential medical supplies from Israel, or the diversion of resources by Hamas to benefit its terrorist infrastructure,” or how the Palestinian Authority blocks medical supplies to Gaza because of endless fighting between the PA and Hamas. Nor will WHO credit Israel for the tens of thousands of Gazans who are treated in Israeli hospitals each year, or the hundreds of ambulances and thousands of tons of medical supplies Israel has transferred to Gaza and the West Bank.
In fact, since the coronavirus outbreak, dozens of Gaza’s doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel have received training in managing the virus by Israeli medical teams. This was happening at the same time Hamas goons were rounding up Gazan peace activists who participated in a web conference with Israelis, charging them with treason for “holding a normalization activity with the Israeli occupation.”
Still, just because Hamas and the PA are terrible leaders, is that any reason innocent Palestinians should go without U.S. aid during a pandemic? It’s a fair question, even after we factor in, as Sean Durns just did in January, how Gaza’s “Palestinians overwhelmingly elected Hamas in 2006 elections — elections that followed a five-year-long terror wave, known as the Second Intifada.” Regardless, America (thanks to our Judeo-Christian roots) has always been willing to overlook that sort of thing where our help is really needed – even by people who hate us and our friends.
That’s why Dingell’s letter, the way it never mentions Hamas and specifies that U.S. aid can be released directly to UNRWA (those altruistic heroes fighting the Wuhan virus on Gaza’s front lines!), makes resuming the aid sound utterly reasonable.
Except for there being no reason to expect that any assistance we send now won’t end up right where the rest of it went: in rockets aimed at Israeli schools, in subsidy checks to families of suicide bombers, and topping off Mahmoud Abbas’s economic empire. We’ve known for years that U.S. aid to Palestinians was being embezzled and misused to finance terrorism, just like we knew that, as Jonathan Tobin puts it, since its creation UNRWA “has done far more to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem than to solve it.” How else to explain how UNRWA managed to turn 700,000 Palestinian refugees in 1949 into 5 million today, all while repeating the lie that Israel is waging genocide on Palestinians? Isn’t genocide supposed to result in the victim population getting smaller?
As part of a political dynasty that has kept the family surname on the same U.S. House seat since the Prohibition era, Dingell is too smart to use her brief letter to Ambassador Craft to take political shots. It’s addressed to Craft, but it’s Trump the message is meant for. Dingell is being nice because he’s the only one who can grant her request. So in her letter she doesn’t blame, or even mention, Israel, though I’m sure Tlaib and Omar offered to punch it up with a few of their distinctively colorful descriptors of Zionists. Nor does the letter blame Trump, except implicitly; Dingell’s appeal to “restart” the humanitarian assistance that Trump made a point of ending highlights Democrats’ bitter disappointment over Trump’s decision. But Dingell can’t acknowledge his reasons for doing it, because that would blow the fantasy that he had no reasons, or just likes to be mean. And she never tries to explain why the Palestinians’ health systems and infrastructure are inadequate and falling apart, because that would mean admitting what progressives will never admit, and what Sean Durns can sum up neatly: “It turns out that genocidal Islamist terrorist groups are bad at governing.”
Dingell has to know she’s asking Trump to restart aid regardless that none of the conditions that led to the halt have changed. Her only argument is the emotional one that the coronavirus outbreak in Gaza and the West Bank is a humanitarian crisis. But when has anything in Gaza and the West Bank not been a humanitarian crisis?
It’s one thing to gamble taxpayer funds trying to help people governed by your garden-variety third-world bunglers, dictators, and kleptocrats. Now and then some village might actually get a well dug. But no matter how Dingell and her 58 supporters frame it, it’s not a humanitarian act to knowingly send money to terrorist leaders who openly vow to annihilate every man, woman, and child of one of our staunchest allies. Calling it “aid” doesn’t turn funding jihadist murder into charity. And that’s why Trump should lock it down. Forever.
