A disproportionate preoccupation with Israel leads American and European governments to pour funds into the West Bank and Gaza without any real effort to ensure they’re put to proper use. Not only does this policy divert resources that might be better spent elsewhere, writes Evelyn Gordon, but it actually exacerbates the plight of ordinary Palestinians. An example:
[A] leading Palestinian hospital is at risk of closure because of a $30-million debt. A major reason for this debt is that for years, the Palestinian Authority has failed to pay Mokassed Hospital for many of the patients it treats. This isn’t because the PA lacks money; it has ample funds to pay generous salaries to thousands of terrorists sitting in Israeli jails. Rather, it’s a matter of priorities: on the PA’s scale of values, paying terrorists for killing Israelis is evidently more important than paying doctors for healing Palestinians. . . .
[O]ne factor that has recently exacerbated Mokassed’s problems has elicited worldwide condemnations: Israel’s withholding of tax revenues from the PA over the last two months in response to the latter’s egregious violations of the Oslo Accords, including joining the International Criminal Court. Yet even if Israel handed over that money tomorrow, there’s no reason to think the PA would suddenly start using it to pay Mokassed when it never did so in all the years before Israel halted the transfers.
In . . . numerous cases where the West could use its leverage over the PA to better the lot of ordinary Palestinians, it has refused to do so because it only cares about Israel’s actions. And thus the biggest victims of the West’s Israel obsession have ended up being not Israelis, but the Palestinians themselves.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/the-palestinian-victims-of-the-wests-israel-obsession/