U.S. Must Put a Condition to Palestinian Aid: No More Teaching Jew-Hatred

Whatever happened to the Palestinians? They’re still there, of course, approximately 4.8 million living in the West Bank and Gaza, along with another 2 million or so who have made their homes elsewhere in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. The debate over Palestinian statehood is just as intractable as ever and further from resolution than at any time in recent memory. But perhaps because of the ongoing stalemate, the issue has been obscured by other developments in Israel and abroad.

Most notably, the normalization of Israel’s relationships with several Arab Gulf states through the Abraham Accords and subsequent diplomacy could fundamentally remake the power structure in the Middle East. The fitful negotiations over Iran’s nuclear capability and the growing menace that country poses to the rest of the region have dominated recent news coverage. Within Israel, tensions between the country’s secular and religious communities, controversy over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the prime minister’s legal challenges all commanded much more attention in last month’s election than the Palestinians.

The Biden administration has downplayed their interest in the Israel-Palestinian relationship, making it clear that the new president has little interest in expending international political capital trying to resolve a conflict that has stymied his predecessors of both parties for decades. He put off his initial phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu for weeks after taking office and has still not spoken to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. (Abbas refused a call from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.) Biden’s Defense Department is preparing for a major shift of U.S. military capabilities from the Middle East to the Pacific Rim, further indicating that he is unlikely to seriously engage in the region anytime soon.

So it attracted little mainstream media attention last week when the Biden administration announced it would restore financial aid to the Palestinians that had been halted during President Donald Trump’s presidency. Whether such assistance has proved helpful to the peace process in the past is debatable, but Biden’s decision to return to a pre-Trump approach on this matter is not a radical departure from the manner in which both Democratic and Republican presidents have addressed the issue in the pre-Trump past. Even so, Israel’s U.S. supporters have issued stark warnings about the danger of reestablishing aid without asking the Palestinians and their allies to provide anything in return.

Israel’s U.S. supporters have issued stark warnings about the danger of reestablishing aid without asking the Palestinians and their allies to provide anything in return.

Of immediate concern are potential violations of the Taylor Force Act of 2018, which forbids U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority until it stops making payments to the families of terrorists. The law is named after an American college student killed in a terrorist attack while visiting Israel in 2016. The Act stipulates that American funding can be used only for certain health-related services: It appears that the Biden Administration’s original aid package may provide assistance to programs that are not permitted. Eighteen Republican Senators have written to Blinken asking for closer oversight and further explanation.

But an even greater long-term threat to Israeli-Palestinian peaceful co-existence is posed by the development and dissemination of textbooks for schoolchildren in the West Bank and Gaza, which encourage violence and intolerance against Israel. Lesson plans created by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) were recently discovered to include materials that referred to Israel as “the enemy,” statements that “Jihad is one of the doors to Paradise” and math assignments asking students to identify the number of intifada “martyrs.” U.N. officials have indicated that the materials were distributed in error, but they have not explained how such propaganda was developed by UNWRA to begin with.

For the second consecutive year, Democratic and Republican House members have co-sponsored legislation requiring the U.S. State Department to review all lesson plans sponsored by either UNWRA or the Palestinian Authority to ensure the content is appropriate and non-incendiary. At a time when the U.S. government is preparing to resume sending hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian aid, asking the PA to refrain from indoctrinating their children with anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic slurs seems like a reasonable tradeoff for considerable financial support. If the Biden administration is determined to provide funding for the Palestinians, it’s even more important for the president to support this legislation and demand Palestinian and UNWRA cooperation in return.

There are many difficult decisions looming for Biden and his team as they navigate the often-treacherous waters of the region’s politics. But this should be an easy one. If not, it could be a long four years.

Dan Schnur teaches political communications at UC Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. He hosts the weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall.