The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has announced that it will be cutting the salaries of its civil servants by roughly 40 percent this month due to an Israeli decision to withhold over a hundred million dollars in tax transfers to the PA.
PA Finance Minister Shukri Bishara said at a press conference that the PA must take sweeping austerity measures but that he has taken out a $50 million loan, and will continue to do so on a monthly basis “during the coming period” in order to pay salaries.
The taxes Israel collects on behalf of the Western-backed PA account for roughly half of Ramallah’s budget, while international aid and local duties comprise the rest.
Israel’s security cabinet decided last month that it would withhold $138 million in tax transfers in response to the PA’s payments to Palestinians jailed by Israel for political violence, as well as to the families of terrorists killed by Israel.
We should understand how, from a Palestinian perspective, PA funds to the families of martyrs in the struggle for liberation is no less justified than the national institution of any country taking care of the families of fallen soldiers.
And we should also understand how ridiculously shameful it feels for any self-respecting Israeli to deliver money to an entity seeking to turn back the clock on our own liberation.
Israel might be justified in withholding funds from the PA but we would be wise to recognize not only our obligations to the Palestinian people but also the political opportunity honoring those obligations would bestow on us. Further weakening and marginalizing the PA is a great step forward so long as we’re prepared to take direct responsibility for the people living under its rule.
Withholding funds might punish Fatah. But it’s a mere slap on the wrist and ultimately serves little purpose other than further casting Israel as an oppressor in the lives of Palestinians.
But Israel directly paying those salaries, and perhaps even raising them to the level of what Israeli civil servants earn in the same jobs, would serve the double purpose of effectively dismantling the PA for good and improving the way many Palestinians experience us (though there would certainly be more work to be done on this front).
Any Israeli leader serious about annexation of the territories and full Jewish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria should understand that there is no better way to advance this goal than to take responsibility for the people on the ground. In fact, the Children of Israel don’t have a right to the land so much as we have an obligation to it and to its people – be they native or foreign.
Israel stepping in to pay Palestinian civil servant salaries could not only serve to avert a severe humanitarian crisis and upsurge in desperation on the Palestinian street but could also be a game changer in solidifying Israeli sovereignty, eliminating the increasingly irrelevant PA, directly engaging the Palestinian people and burying the two-state solution obsessively championed by the West.
