JINSA Report #511 Building a Country

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August 19, 2005

JINSA Report #511

Building a Country

The scenes from Gaza are truly wrenching – both those being removed and
those doing the removing range from stoic to heroic to angry to
sad-beyond-measure – prompting sympathetic reporting even from normally
unsympathetic sources. There seems even an understanding that the
communities in Gaza were a) built on sand dunes where nothing had been
grown before; b) now vastly agriculturally productive; c) sources of
legitimate employment for Palestinians as well as Israelis; and d) doomed.
The first three represent the ingenuity, passion and devotion to hard
work and modern technology that brought Israel from one of the poorest
countries in the world at its birth to one of the UN’s Top 20 by the
1990s. Singapore was ranked last in 1948. The fourth is the reason for
the rest of this piece. [Jack Epstein and Lois Jermyn compiled the
information for a piece that appeared today in The San Francisco
Chronicle; the conclusion is ours.]
* Since 1993, the PA has received $1.5 billion from the U.S. and we are
doubling the $275 million allocated for 2005, including $50 million in
direct aid to the PA. The G-8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
Britain, U.S. and Russia) announced $3 billion in aid and is looking for
up to $9 billion more.
* World Bank Trust Fund for Gaza and the West Bank will provide grants
or interest-free loans. A former World Bank president is now the chief
international fundraiser for the PA and used $500,000 of his own money
to buy greenhouses formerly owned by Israelis in Gaza to try to keep
them running.
* The Aspen Institute's Middle East Strategy Group, which includes
Dianne Feinstein, Madeleine Albright and Queen Noor, is seeking millions
in private money.
* Israel has agreed to allow the PA to construct a seaport and rebuild
the airport in Gaza and is considering a trade corridor between Gaza and
the West Bank, as existed before the Palestinians went to war against
Israel in 2000.
* Egypt will provide weapons, ammunition, and equipment to PA police and
its forces will help patrol the Sinai-Gaza border. Abu Mazen will try to
get the rest of the Arabs to fork over at a meeting of the Arab League
in the fall (he will fail).
None of this includes the billions UNRWA has spent minding the prisons
(excuse us, "refugee camps") in Gaza. And all of this to the PA, which
has stolen and squandered millions in prior aid – the U.S. GAO despaired
of ever finding much of it – and used it for purposes inimical to peace,
to prosperity for its own people and to American interests. Gaza is
small, crowded and poor in part because Palestinian leadership used
millions of other people’s dollars for propaganda, repression, multiple
armies, apartments in Paris, and payments to the families of suicide
bombers.
Charity funneled to the same crooks and killers may make donors feel
good, but they cannot want a stable and prosperous Gaza more than the
Palestinians do. It may be that Palestinians have the same passion and
ingenuity as Israelis and Singaporeans, but as long as their priority
remains the destruction of Israel, the money is down a rat hole.

To view this JINSA Report online click on the link below.
http://www.jinsa.org/JINSAReports/3126

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