The PA Has Only Itself to Blame

We were disappointed by the analysis in the article “The Palestinian Authority Is Collapsing” (July 17, 2024), by Shira Efron and Michael Koplow. Although the authors are right to raise the crucial issue of the dysfunction and inefficacy of the Palestinian Authority, they are wrong to attribute the PA’s failings to Israel. To properly address the disarray of the PA and salvage any hope of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is time to engage in an honest evaluation of the authority’s actions.

The authors cite the PA’s financial troubles as a primary cause of its dysfunction and blame them on Israel. What they neglect to mention, however, is that in 2018, the last year that the PA made its budget public, $350 million—seven percent of the total—was reserved to pay terrorists who killed or injured civilians in Israel or members of the Israel Defense Forces, and to pay the families of those terrorists. This practice of “pay for slay” is mandated by Palestinian Authority Laws Nos. 14 and 19 of 2004, which obligate the PA to pay a monthly salary to anyone incarcerated in Israeli prisons for “his participation in the struggle against the occupation,” as well as to the families of those who die within the context of this struggle—a definition that the PA applies to many Palestinians who have carried out terrorist attacks. No fair assessment of the PA’s cash crisis can overlook this fact.

The authors point to the PA’s substantial cash deficit, which compelled the authority to implement significant salary reductions. Yet while civil servants are suffering with 50 percent salary cuts, the authority continues to pay terrorists and their families 100 percent of their stipends. According to the Israeli nonprofit organization Palestinian Media Watch, in June, Muhammad Hamida, an official in the PA’s economy ministry, described such payments as “a priority.” An honest consideration of the PA’s financial crisis must acknowledge the blatant prioritization of terrorist payments over its civil service.

The authors note that the PA’s vast corruption contributes to its incapacity. But its failures reflect more than the venality of individual leaders. According to Article 5 of Palestinian Authority Decree Law No. 1 of 2013, the PA is required to employ any males who have served at least ten years and females who have served at least five years in Israeli prisons for their “struggle against the occupation”—and at salaries no less than the monthly “pay for slay” stipends they received in prison. The more time they spent in prison—that is, the graver their terrorist acts—the higher their job placement and the greater their seniority. The PA has created a perverse system that incentivizes violence and hatred, breeding a bureaucracy of malfeasance and depravity and undermining any hope of productive diplomacy.

Before condemning Israel for “degrading” the PA, as Efron and Koplow do, one must acknowledge that the PA has degraded itself. Before calling on countries, international institutions, and donor organizations to rally around the impoverished authority, as Efron and Koplow do, one must recognize that the PA uses its resources to prioritize the murder of Israelis over basic governance. The PA’s financial condition is a product of an immoral system that it—and it alone—has created.

Elliott Abrams is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Sander R. Gerber is a Managing Partner, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer at Hudson Bay Capital. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America and a member of the advisory board of the Partnership for Peace Fund, which is administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.

EFRON AND KOPLOW REPLY:

Elliott Abrams and Sander Gerber are rightly concerned with the Palestinian Authority’s dysfunction and corruption, and as they acknowledge, so are we. But they ignore the primary argument of our article. We do not absolve the PA or deny its agency in a host of self-inflicted wounds. Rather, we argue that unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state, as many countries have done, may do more harm than good in the absence of measures that would reform and bolster the PA and provide it with a pathway to potential success. Indeed, we detail multiple ways in which the PA is failing the Palestinian people and acting inimically to a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We also explicitly state that international assistance to the PA should not be open-ended: “donors must condition this support on the PA implementing specific reforms—and commit to helping the PA implement them.” We agree with Abrams and Gerber that eliminating what the PA calls the “prisoners payment law”—which compensates Palestinians imprisoned for killing Israelis and the families of those who die while carrying out such attacks—should be at the top of the list of those reforms, as should transitioning to a purely need-based social security system.

Although the PA’s shortcomings are undeniable, so is the Israeli government’s role in ensuring that the PA has even less legitimacy and ability to govern. The fact that the PA repeatedly shoots itself in the foot does not override the fact that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has openly declared his intention to bankrupt and eventually collapse the authority, which he claims is a bigger threat to Israel than is Hamas, since the PA supports the two-state outcome that both Smotrich and Hamas detest. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has a responsibility to follow Israeli law, which requires withholding tax revenues that Israel collects on the PA’s behalf in an amount equal to what the authority budgets for compensation under the PA’s “prisoners payment law.” But Israeli law does not explain or justify unrelated punitive Israeli actions, including Smotrich’s decisions to withhold all tax revenues for months and to allow Palestinian banks to interact with Israeli ones only if the Israeli government retroactively legalizes illegal Jewish outpost settlements in the West Bank—decisions that Israeli military and defense officials opposed on security grounds.

One can and should condemn the PA for degrading itself, but one must also acknowledge the explicit Israeli role in deliberately bringing the PA to the brink of collapse for political reasons that have nothing to do with the reprehensible compensation system established by the “prisoners payment law.” And before cheering on a potential PA implosion, it is worth considering what would fill the inevitable vacuum and how Israeli, Palestinian, and U.S. interests would be adversely affected.