The recent $50 million aid grant to Palestinians. Canadian Middle-East Policy is God’s vengeance on logic

Dogan Akman

Once again, the Government of Canada decided to pledge, this time around about $50 million to respond to the urgent needs of the Palestinians under the Palestinian Authority and those in Gaza.

On July 30^th, Marie Claude Bibeau Minister of International Development, stated that Canada will provide: a)$12.65 million to various international organisations such as the World Food Programme and the United Nations Children’s program  to respond to the urgent needs of the most vulnerable groups of the West Bank and Gaza, including (women) survivors of gender-based violence and people with disabilities; b) a further $37 million to four NGOs to increase the economic opportunities for Palestinians, especially for women and youth. One of these NGOs “Save Children Canada” (SCC) received $8 million over four years for its project that will help young female Palestinians builds businesses. The SCC said that the funding will address gender-based barriers to entrepreneurship.

The Minister is reported to have said that the funding will help support a two-state solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She further stated that “These initiatives will ultimately help the Palestinian people to build the social and economic conditions necessary for a two-state solution”.

Her statement was echoed by the Israeli Ambassador to Canada who is reported to have said that Canada’s contributions to peace and a two-state solution through its assistance to Palestinians, particularly to women and girls, are “indispensable”.

On the home front, the portion of the grant devoted to women and girls is consistent with the Prime Minister’s feminist agenda and is designed to please this political constituency. Otherwise, the rest of the grant is designed to please his pro-Palestinian constituency, including its radical segment, as well as Canadians who are most anxious to be seen as charitable, generous souls by the world community.

On the international front, the grant is part of the Prime Minister’s virtue-signalling grand strategy to secure a seat at the Security Council of the United Nations.

The conflict between the Arab countries and “the so-called” Palestinians and Israel has been going in one form or another since 1948. Since that time the Palestinian refugees and their descendants have been treated generously by UNWRA-far more generously than any other refugee group under the jurisdiction of the U.N. and after the Oslo Agreements, both by the U.N. and the very generous financial aid provided by the West and the U.S. in particular.

This western generosity has led to the current state of affairs where the P.A  converted terrorism to a paid profession financed by  the huge amounts of foreign aid while Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza cannot get enough of engaging in unprovoked warfare with Israel, with the two -state solution or any peaceful solution still nowhere in sight.

In the circumstances, the expenditure of $50 million cannot be justified on the grounds advanced by the Canadian Minister. The fact that the Israeli Ambassador echoed the Minister’s assertion, for reasons best known to his superiors in Jerusalem is neither here nor there.

The facts of the matter are  that ,but for the  utterly scandalous corruption starting with Arafat and his entourage and carrying on with his successors and their entourage and   the gross mismanagement  of the resources of the P.A, the generous financial resources provided by the West  just over the last 40 years would have provided the P.A with all the funds necessary to build the social and economic conditions necessary to deal with  and solve all the needs and wants  of all the Palestinians governed by the P.A. in the West Bank and Gaza and to ready them to clinch  the two-state solution.

The simple fact of the matter is that  to any person with working knowledge  of the history  of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and insight into the human mind, it has long been self- evident that, firstly, there is no causal connection between  this type  of funding and the nature  and type of support required  by the Palestinians to reach the two-state solution, and secondly, that  the kind of help provided by Canada could not and would not possibly ultimately help the Palestinian people to build the social and economic conditions necessary for a two-state solution, as the massive aid provided to date has failed to create these conditions.

This person would have informed Minister Bibeau that, firstly, the rationale for giving this aid is hair-brained and secondly, it is severely, if not fatally, undermined by Canadian’s policy to finance the education dispensed in the schools of UNWRA.

And the person would have further told the Minister that her scheme is hair-brained because based on her day to day activities, she should have known that in order to make a valid purchase it is imperative for her and the vendor to have a meeting of the mind with respect to all the matters and issues involved in the transaction and that this requirement in order for parties to reach any kind of agreement, including a peace treaty between warring parties.

Clearly then, the key ingredient and the fundamental and absolute condition precedent for any kind of solution is the willingness of both parties to make peace. In the absence of such willingness on the part of the  both Palestinian entities on the West bank and in Gaza respectively, given the corrupt  practices  and gross mismanagement of these entities, the social and economic conditions deemed to be necessary are both illusory and unattainable.

Ironically enough,  my argument  was corroborated when, just seven days before the announcement of the aid package in Ottawa,  on July 23rd,inst. in a ceremony held in Ramallah  to “honour”  Palestinian martyrs and prisoners, Mahmood Abbas , President of the P.A, vowed  to continue funding the families of “martyrs” (i.e. dead terrorists) and the terrorists serving penal sentences in Israel. He said: “If we had one single penny left, we would spend it on the families of martyrs and the prisoners.” Damned, be the problems and needs of the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, and the vulnerable, of women and girls and of the rest.

In the circumstances, the effect of Canada’s grant and all western generosity is to relieve the P.A and Hamas of their respective legal duties and moral obligations to address and remedy the problems of all its citizens including the groups identified above.

In the premises, Canada’s gift subsidizes the business of terrorism and thereby destroys any prospect of securing any peaceful solution.

For a country whose government proclaims its steadfast commitment to fight terrorism on an international scale along with its allies, I have yet have to hear the government publicly and repeatedly condemn the terrorism sponsored and financed by the P.A or the terrorism perpetrated by Hamas and its ilk in Gaza. For the Prime Minister It is bad domestic politics.

At the end of the day, the P.A showed its gratitude for Canada’s generosity by siding with Saudi Arabia in its treatment of Canada.

Clearly, if Canada and other European Union  countries  want to secure a two-state solution, the best way to move forward in that direction is to withhold all foreign aid to the P.A. minimally until it ceases to engage in terrorism and to Gaza until Hamas and its ilk  disarm. Something which I venture to guess is unlikely to happen so long as “the sun shines and the rivers flow”.

Regrettably, this is not even the end of the matter.

On the whole, Canadians support foreign aid that is well-conceived and well spent. However, Canadians would take, as I do, strong exception to the government wasting Canadians’ hard earned money to incur this kind of mindless expenditure.

In the present case, G-d’s vengeance of logic manifested itself when the government inverted the wise old dictum on its head to read: “charity starts abroad”, by diverting Canadians’ hard earned money to deal with t Palestinian made Palestinian problems, when we have the pressing problems of all the needy and vulnerable classes of people at home.

By way of illustration,  the aboriginal peoples of Canada who live on 91 out of the approximately 600 reserves have yet to be all provided with clean drinking water- a basic necessity of life, and the government projects that it  will not be able to provide it to all  of them until 2012 the earliest. Whether the government can make this happen by then is another matter. The infrastructure a great many reserves are in shambles. And these are just of many critically serious problems that afflict not only the peoples living on reserves but also those that moved to urban centres.

Speaking of the class of vulnerable people, an extensive research study on child poverty and family poverty published by the Family Service of the City of Toronto in 2016 found that:

nearly one in every five Canadian children (18.5%), 1.3 million of them live in poverty, far greater than it was in 1989. The percentage rises to 60% for aboriginal children living on reserves.

Compared to the OECD countries, the financial support granted to Canadian families is below the average of that granted to the families in the countries comprising the organisation, Canada’s relative standing having further deteriorated since 2009.

Out of the 29 countries surveyed by UNICEF, in terms of the general well-being of children, Canada ranked 19th while in terms of  the degree of general inequalities among children ranked  in order of countries where the inequalities  are smallest, Canada ranked 26^th out of 36 countries.

In 2017, food insecurity affected 4 million Canadians with the situation in one province described by the researchers as national crisis.”

And I could go on with more grim statistics of poverty and dire living conditions among the 65+ age category and the disabled.

The amount in question is hardly enough to address the foregoing social and economic problems among others. But then again this is just of one of the many ways in which Canada’s foreign aid policy in the Middle-East provokes G-d’s vengeance.

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Dogan Akman was born and schooled in Istanbul, Turkey. Upon his graduation, he immigrated to Canada. He started his professional career teaching university sociology, criminology and social welfare policy. After a stint as a Judge of the Provincial Court of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, he joined the Federal Department of Justice as a Crown prosecutor, He later moved over to civil litigation and specialised in aboriginal law. He retired from the practice of law in 2009.