At Commentary, Rick Richman sums up quickly and succinctly why the negotiations with the Palestinian Arab Muslim terrorist group Fatah are unworkable.
First, the Palestinians refused to negotiate unless Netanyahu endorsed a two-state solution and froze settlement construction; Netanyahu did both, and the Palestinians refused to negotiate. They had to be dragged into “proximity talks” and then dragged into “direct negotiations” and then left.
Second, the Palestinian Authority canceled local elections in the West Bank, unwilling to risk them even in the part of the putative state it nominally controls. The PA is now headed by a “president” currently in the 72nd month of his 48-month term, with a “prime minister” appointed by the holdover “president” rather than by the Palestinian parliament (which, unfortunately, is controlled by the terrorist group the Palestinians elected five years ago). These days, the PA turns for approval not to its public or its parliament but rather to the Arab League, while the other half of the putative state is run by the terrorist group. As a democratic state, “Palestine” is already a failed one.
There’s two more to read.
Last year I also pointed out some basic dysfunctions within the failed non-state.
As of last year, the PA requested 7 billion dollars to “overhaul” its security forces to a mere 50,000 men at a rate of 23 “police” for each thousand Palestinian Arabs. That is 6 times the ratio of the NYPD. Since Oslo, the numbers have fluctuated from 40,000 to 80,000 under 14 separate police forces, which are individually loyal to different sub-factions within the PLO. And with all that “security”, there is no actual law or order to be found. That is because “Palestinian Police” was how the various PLO affiliated terrorist militias were rebranded by the Clinton Administration. Most continued to operate as terrorists carrying out attacks against Israel. The rest function as the private police of various officials within the Palestinian Authority. And much as the State Department might like to pretend otherwise, all the PA police forces are not loyal to any laws, but only to those officials who pay them and give them orders.
There is no constitutional rule of law within the PA. There isn’t even a legally elected head of the Palestinian Authority. There isn’t even a single government ruling over Gaza and the West Bank. There is no economy. As much as 25 to 50 percent of the Palestinian adult male population is employed by the Palestinian Authority, which is its own biggest employer with as many as 200,000 people out of a population of barely 2 million in the West Bank. That’s one PA employee to 10 Palestinian Arab men, women and children. It means that with 42 percent of the population under 14, virtually every Palestinian Arab family has a member who is officially employed by the Palestinian Authority. Some more than one.
And guess who pays for all this? The Palestinian Authority has never been self-supporting, it could not survive for 5 seconds without money from the United States and the European Union. The billions of dollars pumped into the PA’s coffers go down the line to various officials and their families, as well as the terrorist militias who keep them in power. Often the money has a way of vanishing, as it did in 1997 when the PA reported that 40 percent of its budget just went “missing”. The PA employment racket is not simply a bureaucratic blank check though. Jobs are given in exchange for support. The “employees” may not ever actually show up for work, but they are expected to use their tribal and family influence to back the PA leadership. And the remainder of that money goes to the tens of thousands of terrorists officially described as the police.
But we aren’t done yet, because while the largest employer in the PA may be the authority itself, the second largest employer is the UNRWA, with a 95 percent Palestinian Arab staff. The UNRWA is dedicated only to aiding Palestinian Arabs and the vast majority of its budget comes from the US and Europe. Again. The UNRWA’s employees not only overlap with those of the PLO and Hamas, but it is rife with waste spending more on Palestinian Arabs than the UNHCR does on other refugees in the world.
As for the rest of the PA economy… you just saw it. With over 50 percent unemployment in a part of the world where single income families are the norm and nearly 50 percent of the population is underage, the Palestinian economy is the American and European taxpayer. The few exceptions for the most part work in the same settlements that the world keeps demanding that Israel tear down, or across the Green Line in Israel, resulting in an unemployment spike every time there is a terrorist attack and Israel has to shut down its inner borders. There is no other economy, despite the billions invested by governments and individuals in everything from industrial parks to ready to use greenhouses, there has been no other economy, and there will be no other economy. Which should be obvious when the Palestinian Authority lists Olive-Wood Carvings and Mother-of-Pearl Souvenirs as two of its major industries. When you’re listing not just souvenirs, but a very specific type of souvenir as a major industry, you really have no economic plan except to ask other people for money.
…but there’s always the booming organ theft industry.
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