Architect of US law against PA ‘pay-to-slay’ skeptical of Ramallah effort to end it
Sander Gerber ‘cautiously optimistic,’ but says ‘ambiguous’ Abbas decree making welfare stipends contingent on economic need doesn’t address all concerns regarding terror support
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
WASHINGTON — The main architect behind Congressional legislation that suspended US aid to the Palestinian Authority over its payments to security prisoners and the families of slain attackers said Tuesday he is “cautiously optimistic” about Ramallah’s decision to reform the payment system that critics argued incentivized terrorism.
Sander Gerber said that the decree signed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday is a “step in the right direction,” as it moves the families of prisoners and slain attackers into the same welfare system as the rest of Palestinian society, which receives stipends strictly based on economic need.
However, he told The Times of Israel that the decree makes no mention of ending the PA’s Prisoners Club and Martyrs Fund, which support the families of those in Israeli jails and of those killed or injured carrying out attacks.
“They’re actively glorifying the prisoners and martyrs and encouraging the children of these families to do the same,” said Gerber, a chief executive of a New York-based hedge fund and a former AIPAC board member.
Prisoners Club chief Qadura Fares came out fervently against Abbas’s decree earlier Tuesday, calling on the PA president to immediately reverse it.
The PA, in its announcement of the reform, said it was moving its database containing information on the families of prisoners and slain attackers from the Social Welfare Ministry to a new independent body called the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment, which will be allocating all social welfare payments moving forward.
Gerber questioned why this move was being taken if all families would be required to re-apply for welfare payments. “It’s because they’re still going to be designated as prisoners or martyrs,” he said.
US government legal experts reviewed the PA’s reform plan during the Biden administration and said it would place Ramallah in compliance with the 2018 Taylor Force Act that Gerber helped write if implemented as stated.
Those same legal experts continue to serve under the Trump administration, which will be responsible for reviewing the PA’s implementation of the reform. Asked if he trusts those experts’ judgment, Gerber responded, “I trust that they’re all well-meaning.”
“It’s too early to tell [whether the reform is real]. The decree is ambiguous about whether the terrorists will get the same [amount of money],” he said.
The shift to a welfare system will mean 40,000 recipients of the prisoner and martyr stipends will begin receiving far less than what they had been allocated to date, Gerber claimed. “If you don’t see protests on the street of these 40,000 people who are newly impoverished, you know that it’s all a shell game,” he said.
The correlation between cuts to income and protests is not always clear, though. Nearly 200,000 PA public sector employees were receiving half of their salary for months last year due to the Israeli withholding of Palestinian tax revenues. Over 100,000 have had their work permits for jobs in Israel and its settlements terminated since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught. And yet, there have been no massive Palestinian protests in the West Bank.
The initiative to cancel the stipends had been in the works for years, and its pilot program was even quietly launched toward the end of the Biden administration, a source familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel.
Ramallah presented the reform to the US near the beginning of the previous administration, seeking to bring the PA into compliance with the Taylor Force Act.
The US then facilitated a dialogue with the Israeli government to explain the contents of the reform, the source said, acknowledging that it was met with skepticism in Jerusalem.
The Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday night dismissing the decree “as a new fraudulent exercise by the PA, which intends to continue making payments to terrorists and their families through other channels.”
Israeli law requires the government to conduct a review of the PA’s prisoner payment system at the beginning of every calendar year, so Jerusalem could theoretically wait until early 2026 before deciding whether Ramallah is in compliance with Knesset legislation targeting the PA over its controversial stipends.
The Trump administration may also have different criteria for adjudicating the PA reform, even though it was authorized by career legal bureaucrats under the previous administration.
The practice of paying allowances to those convicted of carrying out terror attacks, and to the families of those killed while carrying out attacks, has been pilloried by critics as incentivizing terror, and held up by Israel as a symbol of PA corruption and its inability to be a partner for peace.
Palestinian leaders have long defended the payments, describing them as a form of social welfare and necessary compensation for victims of what they said is Israel’s callous military justice system in the West Bank.
While the effort to reform the PA prisoner payment system has been in the works for years, and was largely finalized under the Biden administration, Ramallah decided to hold off on announcing the move, preferring to save it as a goodwill gesture for the incoming Trump administration.
During the transition between the Biden and Trump White Houses, top PA officials briefed their counterparts in the incoming Trump administration regarding their plan, two sources familiar told The Times of Israel on Monday.
