USAID was a political agent for anti-Israel diplomacy
USAID not only ignored but actively sought to undermine any acknowledgement of the right of Jews to live in their historic homeland.
By Yisrael Medad
JNS
Feb 3, 2025
Observing the Trump administration’s battles with USAID has brought a bit of satisfaction and even some schadenfreude.
Its site has been down for a few days and several of its security officials were placed on leave after a clash with Department of Government Efficiency agents, with Elon Musk himself writing in a social-media post that “USAID is a criminal organization.” President Donald Trump said USAID was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics.”
After checking my blog, I found that I have been following USAID’s deeds since at least 2007. In that fiscal year, USAID had invested $50 million in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Bush administration has requested an increase to $77 million for the next fiscal year. That year, I also caught an advertisement it had published here in Israel.
The ad made it clear that it was treating the areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as a separate territorial entity, even bypassing the Palestinian Authority. Using its financial weight, USAID was not only supposedly improving lives and economies, but influencing the diplomatic developments and desired political outcomes of America’s foreign-policy chieftains.
What also became clear, as I further investigated, was that USAID not only ignored but actively sought to undermine any acknowledgement of the right of Jews to live in their historic homeland.
Some 14 years later, at a U.S. State Department press briefing on April 7, 2021, the media was informed that U.S. economic, development, security and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people would be “restarted” and that the “assistance, of course, will be provided consistent with U.S. law.” The aid included $75 million in “economic and development assistance in the West Bank and Gaza,” and USAID would directly find “peacebuilding programs” in the amount of $10 million. UNRWA would receive $150 million in “humanitarian assistance.”
As for “peacebuilding” results, I doubt there is anyone rational who would conclude that the money expended for this purpose has not only failed but must be suspect as having gone to the exact opposite purpose. Just this week, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration had “funneled $3 million to Palestinian Authority ‘security forces’ for weapons training”—and this after its members carried out attacks on Israelis.
Allow me to return to Price’s reference that the financial assistance needed to be “consistent with U.S. law.” A reporter inquired of Price, “When you say that all this aid is going to be provided in—well, consistent with U.S. law, I’m curious as to how actually you’re going to do that.” He added, “U.S. law—there’s several of them—says that the U.S. cannot provide money to the Palestinian Authority, or—perhaps more importantly—money that would be fungible … as long as they continue to pay stipends to people convicted of anti-Israel or anti-U.S. attacks and their families. So how exactly are you going to square this?”
Price responded by first characterizing the aid announced as being “consistent with our interests, it is consistent with our values, it is consistent with the interests of those in the region … as well as the interests of our Israeli partners.” Of course, he was trying to avoid the issue of the funds being consistent with the law, specifically the Taylor Force Act and the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act. How would he do that?
Well, he would basically outright bluff his way through. He declared, “I just want to underscore that all of this aid is absolutely consistent with relevant U.S. law, including those two statutes … we provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza through experienced and trusted independent partners on the ground, and it’s these partners who distribute directly to people in need.” He assured the media that the administration has “aggressive risk mitigation systems in place aimed at ensuring. …U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance is reaching those for whom it is intended.”
Continuing to be pressed, Price asserted that the P.A. is not the direct recipient of the assistance, only their “creditors.” He then repeated that “what we are doing is in service of our interests, our values, consistent with U.S. law, and betters the lives of the people in the region.”
In February 2025, following the most recent Gaza campaign, the world aware of the role that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), as well as the “creditors” of the P.A., play in facilitating, encouraging, assisting and teaching Arab anti-Israel terror. Even World Central Kitchen was forced to fire dozens of employees in Gaza last December due to terror ties. Several USAID employees and workers have been killed in Gaza.
The terror links are not new. The Washington Times reported on March 4, 2007, that USAID provided more than $140,000 in assistance to the Hamas-controlled Islamic University in Gaza, including scholarships to 49 of its students. While no U.S. assistance was directed to the Islamic University the previous year, USAID continued to fund multimillion-dollar programs through American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), which is building a high-tech facility for the school. USAID also gave $2.3 million in aid in 2006 to Al-Quds University, which has student groups affiliated with designated terrorist organizations on campus and last month held a weeklong celebration of the man credited with designing and building the first suicide belts more than a decade ago.
In addition to support for terror, USAID also props up the diplomatic damage done to Israel’s administration of Judea and Samaria, and its sovereignty in Jerusalem. Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are excluded from student grants, visits of artists, sports persons, literary figures and other “soft” programs in a quite discriminatory fashion, which would probably be illegal if practiced in the United States. That problem is avoided neatly by a clause in their tenders that reads: “Targeting assistance to certain populations as defined in the Project Description will not be construed as discrimination.”
Moreover, this discrimination over the past two decades and more was intended to convince the P.A. that Jews could be ignored, that Jerusalem could be redivided and that there was no need for Jews of Bet El to dialogue with Arabs of Ramallah since USAID defined their programs as fundamentally apartheid-like. No Jews allowed was the subtext, as I wrote here at JNS in 2018.
Samantha Power, who served as the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2021 until January of this year, used her powers politically, diplomatically and ideologically to Israel’s disadvantage. There should be little disappointment expressed at ending USAID.
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