Is the United States going to cut off PA aid money?

The United States Congress is set to withhold upwards of 200 million USD from the Palestinian Authority according to The Independent.  On the surface this sounds like a blow to the Palestinian Authority but it will be the Palestinian people which suffer the most. It is unlikely that the Palestinian Authority will not be fully cut off from US and Israeli aid in the foreseeable future.

The Independent is reporting that the United States Congress is going to withhold 200 million dollars in aid money earmarked for the Palestinian Authority (PA). The move is a response to the unilateral PA move to seek statehood recognition in the United Nations. The aid money was said to be earmarked for food aid, health care and to support efforts to build a nascent state.

In the build up to the Palestinian statehood bid in the United Nations, some conservative American politicians floated the idea that the United States should punish the Palestinian leadership by withholding aid money; a primary source of income for a Palestinian Authority struggling to pays its bills.

The Palestinian Authority is in a dire situation. According to an International Crisis Group report dated 12 September 2011,

The Palestinian leadership in Ramallah is in an unenviable position. It lacks legitimacy. Negotiations, after decades of failure, have been discredited in the eyes of the people, who are convinced talks have prolonged occupation…The PA is under financial strain. The regional mood is inhospitable to slow and deliberative progress. The leadership thus is unable and unwilling to maintain its course of the past two decades—but so too is it unwilling to jettison it.

By withholding money from PA, the US, presumably with the full knowledge of their Israeli partners, is playing with fire. A severely bankrupt PA unable to pay 100,000 employees could spark outright rebellion against the Palestinian leadership. Growing Palestinian discontent with the PA leadership, easily detected on the streets of Ramallah, could transform into West Bank civil disobedience directed at the PA and, ultimately, the Israeli occupation. But this is not going to happen.

It is increasingly probable that the United States and Israel have decided to slowly move the Palestinian economy in the West Bank back to its Second Intifada levels of ‘near catastrophe.’ Described succinctly in the work of Israeli political philosophers Adi Ophir and Ariella Azouly, Israel kept the Palestinian economy just above catastrophic levels of widespread hunger and economic collapse during the Second Intifada.

Fully aware that widespread hunger and dire economic conditions on the West Bank would engender worldwide condemnation, Israel carefully exerted control over its captive Palestinian economy.  In 2006, when Hamas came into power in the Gaza Strip, Israel along with other Western countries again exercised their ability to punish Palestinians for their decisions however misguided.

The Palestinian Authority and Israel work closely on a variety of issues concerning governance in the West Bank. For example, Israel depends on the PA security forces in the West Bank to keep Palestinian discontent from manifesting into actual rebellion, unarmed or armed, against Israel’s occupation. In this regard, a certain amount of aid revenue, enough to maintain the viability of the PA, is virtually guaranteed from the United States and Israel. The move to withhold 200 million dollars for projects related to health care and the building of the state is a crude way to apply pressure directly on the Palestinian people without affecting their leadership.  Palestinians are now being punished for decisions taken by a leadership which did not consult them.

PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has spent the last two years building an economy under occupation with encouraging results. However, the American move to withhold a small portion of aid shows that no matter the Palestinian efforts to prepare for statehood they are still solely dependent on international aid and the good grace of the Israeli occupation. It is in Israel’s interest to maintain a strong PA which will control growing discontent among Palestinians and stop efforts for widespread civil disobedience. When and if, Israel decides that the PA is no longer operating according to its interests, the money will stop coming.