Israel this week transferred NIS 70 million to the Palestinian Authority to cover an outstanding debt, thereby supplying the PA with the possibility of re-equipping and regrouping for a new round of battles that is likely to develop after the current respite. The above-cited sum was transferred even though Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayed said that it would be used to pay the salaries of 50,000 Palestinian security officials.

Appendix 1 of the interim agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority from September 1995 stipulates that all branches of the Palestinian police force will not exceed 30,000 troops — 12,000 in Judea and Samaria and 18,000 in the Gaza Strip. In the Cairo agreement, which was signed 18 months before, there was mention of only 9,000 combatants. Now there apparently are over 100,000 security officials, policemen and combatants from the various organizations in the territories. If the Palestinians have established a complete army, in utter contradiction to the logic of Oslo, why should Israel honor its commitments and continue to build that army?

The NIS 70 million that Israel recently transferred to the Palestinian Authority will be distributed among the various factions and organizations of Fatah, Tanzim, fronts, police and intelligence services, whose principal raison d’etre at present is to fight against us. The distribution will be decided on the way Arafat has always done things: according to the little black book in which he records who committed which terror attacks. It is not inconceivable that some of this money will be siphoned out to Arafat loyalists in the refugee camps in Lebanon, as occurred in the past.

Moreover, Israel gave the PA this so very critical sum of money for the continuation of the Intifada even though its demand for transparency had not been met. Contrary to the stipulations in the interim agreements-and not part of the “reforms” that are spoken about so much now-the PA never gave Israel a list of the people who receive the payments. The money is distributed in cash and disappears immediately. And if that were not enough, the Palestinian finance minister admitted, as Barnea reported, that he works for Arafat. The source of Arafat’s power over all these years has been principally budgetary, and along comes Israel and rehabilitates his status after the fiasco in the mukataa.

And naturally, just like most of the American aid to Egypt is allocated immediately for military armament, the American pressure on Israel to transfer the funds will produce the mass militarization of the Palestinian territories, which is the very same disease that brought Arafat here in the middle of the 1990s. Now, when there is talk about “reforms” in the Palestinian Authority, it would make sense to transfer some of the recipients of public salaries to the civilian field. But who even dreams that that is going to happen? Instead of being allocated to rehabilitate the Palestinian civilian infrastructure, health, education for children or new infrastructures, the money will be used to continue to build the Palestinian military capabilities. The civilian society that was beginning to become established in the territories was wiped out for the sake of armament and salaries for soldiers. Capital is used for the past, and not for building a future.

Thus large sums of money flow from Israel to Arafat’s junta, while the Palestinian civilians, and certainly the refugees, will continue to enjoy only the crumbs. This way, Arafat’s industry of defiance will continue to poison the atmosphere and will cause Israel to be hated by the future generations, who will continue to undergo a process of militarization, as if nothing has been learned from the past two years. How absurd and how sad.

This piece ran on October 10, 2002 in Yediot Ahronot

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