Former Australian PM: Cut off aid to Palestinians

Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott called on his country to cut millions of dollars of annual aid to the Palestinian Authority, accusing Ramallah of funneling the money to “terrorists and their families.” He also called on Canberra to join any move by the incoming Trump administration in the US to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem.

In an article penned by Abbott and published in The Spectator Australia weekly on Monday, the former PM said Canberra should offer “unswerving support for Israel as the region’s only liberal, pluralist democracy,” and “join any move by the Trump administration to move its embassy to Jerusalem.”

During the 2016 election, Trump pledged to end a longstanding White House policy to perpetually defer a 1995 Congressional decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and move the embassy there.

Abbott’s comments come days after Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull panned the United Nations Security Council resolution that criticized Israeli settlement building as one-sided and biased against Israel.

The resolution last month determined that Israel’s establishment of settlements anywhere outside the pre-1967 lines “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution did not distinguish between the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Abbott, who appointed Bishop and was replaced by Turnbull in 2015, was part of an Australian delegation that visited Jerusalem and Ramallah last month, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.

In his article, Abbott said Hamdallah’s claim that he wanted to live in peace alongside Israel was hard to square with reality.

“This is hard to credit, given Palestinian TV’s consistent glorification of suicide bombers, reference(s) to Jews as the ‘sons of monkeys and pigs’ and claims that the state of Israel is a ‘satanic project,” he wrote.

Australia gave almost AUD 43 million (NIS 120 million) in aid to the Palestinian Territories in 2015-2016 and has pledged slightly more for the coming year, according to official government figures.

“Australia should cut our $40 million a year in aid to the Palestinian Authority while it keeps paying pensions to terrorists and their families,” Abbot wrote in the Spectator.

As per Palestinian law, Ramallah pays nearly $170 million a year to prisoners and families of terrorists, and others killed in the long-running conflict with Israel. These include families of Palestinian suicide bombers and other terrorists. Prisoners’ monthly allowances increase with the length of sentence. According to MEMRI, the allowances range from $364 (NIS 1,500) a month for a term of up to three years, to $3,120 (NIS 13,000) for a term of 30 years and more. There is a monthly $78 supplement for terrorists from Jerusalem and a $130 supplement for Arab Israeli terrorists.

The so-called “martyrs” fund makes monthly payments to about 35,000 families per year, to Palestinian figures, and was set up in 1967 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the group that formally represents all Palestinians. The PLO has been sidelined since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority autonomy government as a result of interim peace deals with Israel in the 1990s.

That fund and another fund supporting families of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel are nominally PLO institutions, but are bank-rolled by the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian officials say welfare payments help victims of Israel’s occupation — providing stipends to families, scholarships to university students and assistance to widows. Israel says the payments glorify terrorism, part of what it sees as a broader trend of “incitement” blamed for fueling renewed violence over the past year.

Australia is one of Israel’s strongest international allies.

In September, Bishop, on an official trip to Israel, invited Netanyahu to visit Australia early in 2017. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, Netanyahu accepted the invitation, though no travel plans have been confirmed.