The Israeli Solution by Caroline Glick

Author:Caroline Glick [Glick, Caroline B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-34807-2
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

The Palestinian Authority’s Destruction of the Palestinian Economy

The Palestinian Authority’s endemic corruption has led to wide-scale impoverishment in areas that, under Israeli military control, had sustained impressive levels of economic growth.54 Between 1993 and 2006, Palestinian GDP plummeted by 68 percent in Judea and Samaria. Most of the decrease occurred before the start of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000 and was caused largely by the endemic corruption of the Palestinian Authority.55

Foreign donor governments, who pay for more than a third of the Palestinian Authority’s operating budget,56 have repeatedly requested that the Palestinian Authority take serious steps to remedy the situation, but it has not done so.57 As the continued repression of freedom of the press since Arafat’s death makes clear, the Palestinian Authority doesn’t investigate allegations of corruption and authoritarianism to redress them—rather, it hides them by silencing its critics.

In 1997 Reyad Agha, a former president of the Islamic University of Gaza, described life under the Palestinian Authority to a New York Times reporter. “We don’t have any kind of rules,” he said, “in the government, in the ministries, in any of the institutions of our society. And when there are rules, Arafat can overrule them, and no one rejects his orders. We are living in a miserable situation, with a corrupt regime and a one-man show.”58

At this writing in 2013, under Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas—whose four-year term of office legally expired in January 2009—little has changed. Speaking of the authoritarian practices of Abbas and his associates, Palestinian journalist Tariq Khamis told Al Jazeera, “The [PA] regime is very similar to other Arab regimes. If the PA had trust in themselves, they would let journalists get on with their work. But because of their mistakes and corruption, they fear the work of journalists.”59

As we just saw, before the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, most Palestinians had scant interest in democracy; but significantly, their suffering under the authoritarian PA kleptocracy has stoked their interest in representative forms of governance.

Their perception of Israeli democracy has also improved. In 2012 a joint poll asked Israelis and Palestinians how they would view an Israeli plan to unilaterally withdraw from Judea and Samaria, in a bid to advance the two-state solution. Forty-four percent of the Israelis supported the plan; 46 percent opposed it. Among the Palestinians, 35 percent supported the plan, while 59 percent opposed it. That is, the Palestinians were much more opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria than were the Israelis.60

This phenomenon is perhaps explained by survey data regarding Palestinians’ assessment of the state of political freedom under PA rule, compared with the territories governed by Israel. In 2002 only 16 percent of Palestinians felt positively about the status of Palestinian democracy, and in 2010 only 27 percent of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria believed that a person could criticize the Palestinian Authority without fear. In sharp contrast, since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, Palestinian admiration for Israeli democracy and respect for human rights has

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