Cut off American aid to Palestinian Authority

It is time to stop throwing good money after bad. That would be the $400 million American taxpayers send each year to the corrupt Palestinian Authority in the misguided belief that its leadership is committed to a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas closed out 2014 by seeking but failing — by only one vote — to get the U.N. Security Council to approve a Palestinian statehood resolution.

He followed up by applying to join the International Criminal Court in hopes the PA or its allies can pursue bogus war crime charges against Israel.

UN General Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Tuesday accepted the Palestinian court application effective April 1. Abbas plans to take another run at getting the Security Council to mandate Palestinian independence by 2017 now that the new year brings a change in membership expected to add more friendly votes. The United States, a permanent member, should and will veto any such Palestinian statehood resolution.

The move by Abbas to internationalize the conflict betrays his lack of commitment to negotiations — not that there’s been doubt about that for several years. As I’ve noted on this page many times, Palestinian leadership has time and again rejected generous peace offers from Israel.

Elected to a four-year term as PA president in 2005 (there’s not been another election), Abbas was viewed by America and Europe as a moderate ready to do a deal with Israel. But in 2008, he didn’t even show up to consider an Israeli offer of a state with nearly all of the West Bank plus swapped land from Israel plus a land connection to the Gaza Strip.

In 2009, Israel froze settlement construction for 10 months to jump-start talks. Abbas waited until the last month to join negotiations only to abandon them when the pause expired. Later he struck to a unity government deal with Hamas in Gaza, hardly a peace overture since Hamas is dedicated to the death of Israel.

Last year, President Barack Obama offered compromise ideas to him, but again silence from Abbas. That is, until he snubbed Obama by going to the United Nations.

Last year, several legislative bodies in Europe, including Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Spain and France, held symbolic votes recognizing a Palestinian state. Such actions and the sympathy they express reflect the delusion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the cause of the hostility to the West from the Islam and Arab worlds.

As demonstrated by the ghastly attack on the Paris satirical Charlie Hebdo newspaper killing 12 people — mostly cartoonists and editors — it is the West and its values with which the fanatical Islamist movement is at war. Democratic Israel is an outpost of those values in the Middle East and, in the eyes of the Islamists, must be eradicated.

The West’s commitment to free expression, practiced by the French journalists in satirizing Muhammad, cannot be tolerated.

Cutting off U.S. dollars to the Palestinian Authority would be a grave move, but Abbas would be responsible. The PA couldn’t survive without donor dollars. Much of the Palestinian population and economy depends on such handouts. However, Abbas and the Palestinian leadership cannot flout their contempt for negotiations and be rewarded with U.S. aid.

As I’ve written before, the problem is not Israel. There is no hope for a two-state solution until the Palestinians and their Arab and Islamic allies unalterably commit to the concept, and to accepting the Jewish state with its Western values.

Email: shuntley.cst@gmail.com