Last month, the International Court of
Justice—prompted by South Africa—issued an interim ruling on the
accusation that Israel is committing genocide in its response to the
Oct. 7 massacre. The ruling stopped short of confirming the charge but
warned Israel to prevent “genocidal acts” banned under the 1948 Genocide
Convention.
The accusation of genocide was sickeningly offensive. It was also stunningly ironic.
It was a Polish Jew who immigrated to the
United States, the jurist Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term
“genocide” in 1944. After the Holocaust, Lemkin’s definition was
codified into international law. Israel was founded in 1948 following
the genocide of six million Jews.
Meanwhile, as the genocide slander
persists, the White House willfully ignores the Palestinian Authority’s
incentive program for killing Israelis: the infamous “pay-for-slay.”
Enshrined in Palestinian law, the program authorizes the eradication of
Israel and the Jewish people. How is this not genocide?
President Joe Biden has been busy enacting
sanctions on four Israeli settlers who committed acts of violence
against Palestinians. If he wishes to be even-handed, it is time for the
White House to demand as a condition for peace that the P.A. finally
end the far worse crime that is the “pay-for-slay” program.
The origins of the program are obvious.
While the Israeli Declaration of Independence welcomes Arab citizens,
the 1964 Palestinian National Charter declares war to the death against
Israel. Technically, the charter was canceled during the Oslo process,
but Palestinians still live by it and teach it in their schools. The
P.A.’s ruling Fatah Party’s charter still explicitly calls for the
“eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural
existence.” This is clearly genocide.
More than a half-century later, not much
has changed except that the budget for killing Jews and eradicating
Israel has risen. The P.A. now pays the families of “martyrs” a lifetime
salary and monthly salaries to terrorist prisoners. The payments are
larger the more people the terrorist in question kills and the length of
his prison sentence. Prisoners are offered government jobs upon
release. All of this costs more than $350 million per year.
Yet the Biden administration has decided
that the P.A. should govern Gaza when the current war ends. This is
intolerable. Instead, the White House should end all support for the
P.A.’s terror-supporting regime.
If for no other reason, it should do so because such support violates U.S. law.
In 2015, Israel was experiencing a wave of
stabbing attacks, often referred to as the “knife intifada.” At the
time, I was vice chairman of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, a
nonpartisan think tank. I had a strong suspicion that the attacks were
not committed by lone wolves, but rather coordinated as part of a larger
plan.
To verify my hunch, I called friends who
work in Arabic media. They tracked down the relevant Palestinian laws
and translated them. They also found the documents that laid out the
system of “pay-for-slay” payments, codified in 2004 and updated in 2013.
I was working on exposing this when
another fatal stabbing occurred in March 2016. This time, the victim was
an American: Former U.S. Army officer Taylor Force, who was stabbed
while visiting Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, as a civilian.
I gently contacted Force’s bereaved
parents and asked them if they knew who and what was behind their son’s
death. Once they learned, they made it their life’s mission to expose
the “pay-for-slay” program.
In 2018, the Taylor Force Act passed both
the House and Senate. It mandated that the U.S. stop using taxpayer
money to fund the P.A. until it ends the “pay-for-slay” program. It
further urged the State Department to call upon the international
community to do the same.
Recently, after 12 members of the
Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA participated in the Oct. 7 massacre,
nations such as the U.S. and Germany stopped supporting the agency. Yet
the U.S. continues to support the P.A. even though this also means
supporting Oct. 7 terrorists. Palestinian Media Watch, a Jerusalem-based
watchdog group, recently revealed that the P.A. will pay 661 Hamas
terrorists from Gaza who were involved in the Oct. 7 massacre.
The P.A., in other words, is party to
Hamas’s genocidal agenda. The White House can no longer ignore this. By
endorsing the P.A. without considering other options for a post-war Gaza
government and without publicly condemning “pay-for-slay,” U.S.
officials are handing power to the wrong people. They are supporting
ideologies and actions hostile to peace that violate U.S. law. Even
worse, they are condoning crimes against humanity.
1 comment:
So if this is true then the U.S. bears responsibility of killing Israelis? (USA)
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