T. Belman. Trump has been defunding the PA from day one. Defunding will continue until they collapse. The EU will also start to defund them because they are a lost cause and Europe doesn’t want to go it alone.
Their financial situation deteriorated amid the coronavirus pandemic, but also during a period when normalization agreements were being negotiated between several Gulf states and Israel.
By SARAH CHEMLA JPOST SEPTEMBER 24, 2020
PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY President Mahmoud Abbas gestures during a meeting to discuss the UAE’S deal with Israel to normalize relations, in Ramallah last month.
Palestinian officials have a feeling that the recent normalization agreements between Gulf states and Israel have led to a sudden decrease in funding from Arab states to the Palestinian Authority.
According to The New Arab and data from the Palestinian Finance Ministry service, Ramallah has received no aid from Arab countries since March, in addition to a 50% decrease in foreign aid.
Ramallah’s total revenues dropped by about 70% this year.
The Palestinian government’s funding dropped by half with respect to foreign aid in the first seven months of the year, from $500 million in 2019 to $255 million in 2020, dropping in Arab aid during the same period by 85% – from $267 million in 2019 to $38 million in 2020.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki examined the reasons behind the sudden fall in funding in a press conference, claiming that “most of the Arab countries did not abide by the decisions of the Arab summits to provide a financial safety net of $100 million for Palestine in the face of US and Israeli sanctions.”
This financial situation happened amid the coronavirus pandemic, but also during a period when normalization agreements, strongly opposed by Ramallah, were being negotiated between several Gulf states and Israel – strongly backed by the US.
US President Donald Trump told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he had “asked the rich Arab countries not to pay the Palestinians,”
“We do not know if this was the result of the financial repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic, or at the request of the United States, as President Trump said,” added Al-Maliki.
“But the result is the same. Unfortunately these [Arab summit safety net] decisions have not been done nor implemented.”
The financial crisis and the fall in Arab and foreign aid has forced the Palestinian Authority to increase its domestic borrowing and search for new sources of revenue.
Last June, European Parliamentarians called for a thorough investigation into how European taxpayers’ money is ending up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists, insisting that any loopholes in the law through which the money is slipping must be closed.
Hundreds of millions of euros are donated annually by the EU to the Palestinian Authority. Approximately 50 million euros each quarter are passed on by the PA to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in turn finances organizations such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which has carried out suicide attacks in Israel.
“There is no terror financing from EU funds; as long as there are EU funds that will not be happening. This will not be tolerated, and if it happens, it will be rectified,” said EU enlargement commissioner Olivér Várhelyi. “And I will see it to it myself that it is done and delivered.”
Donna Rachel Edmunds contributed to this report.
“Report: Saudis urged UAE and Bahrain to sign deal with Israel – Middle East
As the UAE and Bahrain prepared to sign a deal to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel this summer, Saudi Arabia was quietly urging them on, according to a report in The Guardian.
For several months before the deals were signed at the White House, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had been laying out his rationale for a pact that would overturn regional policies towards long-term foe Iran.
According to The Guardian, while a pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia is growing closer, Prince Mohammed is unlikely to give Trump what would be his biggest foreign policy achievement before the US election, three sources close to the royal court said.
Instead, the Kingdom is likely to continue its role of urging regional allies across the line – effectively in its name. Sudan and Oman are firm favorites to strike a deal before the year is out but Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are likely to bide their time and hold out for bigger prizes.
Addressing the United Nations general assembly on Wednesday, Saudi King Salman stuck to the script of the 2002 Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Initiative, which had been seen as a template until the past few years.
However, according to The Guardian, the Saudi Crown Prince views the region through a different lens to his predecessors, seeing Iranian expansionism as a bigger threat to stability than the seven-decade failure to bring about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. According to two sources familiar with Prince Mohammed’s thinking, his views have been greatly influenced by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, since the two met in 2017.
“Kushner was just as transactional as his father-in-law,” said one Saudi source. “He was all about user pays; if you back a cause, or a person, they need to have your back. It was a language MBS understood and he wasted little time applying it to new Saudi positions on Palestine and Lebanon, both of which had become a never-ending burden.”
US President Donald Trump told reporters last week that many more countries are on the way to reaching new peace deals in the Middle East.
Asked if he expected Saudi Arabia to follow suit, Trump said, “I do. I spoke with the king of Saudi Arabia.” He added the move would come “at the right time.”
The President recently said he expected Saudi Arabia to join the Israel-UAE deal. A senior member of the Saudi royal family later stressed that Saudi Arabia’s price for normalizing relations with Israel is the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
King Salman reiterated that position during a recent conversation with Trump, saying there would be no normalization with Israel without Palestinian statehood.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)”