Today the TaxPayers’ Alliance has released a new study looking into British aid spending in the Palestinian territories and what that money supports. We’ll be launching the report, along with versions in German, French, Italian, Swedish and Slovakian, in Brussels later this week as a lot of the aid goes through the European Union, as this is taxpayers’ money and it is time this issue moved up the policy agenda.
In November 2007, at the Annapolis conference, both sides pledged to seek a two state solution to the conflict. Since then we’ve had the conflict in Gaza. It should be very clear that negotiations are not the only critical step in obtaining peace in the region, as they are often made out to be.
Even the best treaty will quickly be rendered worthless if the populations of Israel and the Palestinian territories don’t reject the cries of those who attack any peace deal as an unnecessary compromise. Particularly important are the 42 per cent of the Palestinian population who are under 15. That huge young generation’s attitudes will be critical to whether or not a stable peace can be achieved.
There are obviously plenty of reasons for Israelis and Palestinians to hate each other. The same is true of the populations involved in most protracted conflicts. However, it is vital that everything possible is done to minimise that hatred.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza do nothing of the sort. On television and radio, in newspapers and even in school books the Palestinians are encouraged to see an ongoing violent struggle as preferable to a peaceful compromise.
On the 8th of January 2008, on the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC), Ahmed Dughmush told viewers:
“Palestine is our dream. Brothers, Oh Fatah’s loyal masses the land is thirsty [for martyr blood] […] Jaffa, Haifa and Acre are calling. Ramallah.. Nablus and Gaza: “When will we meet and break the chains?” To Jerusalem march millions of Martyrs”
Palestinian Authority TV shows images of all of Israel/Palestine draped in the Palestinian flag, encouraging the idea that Israel can, and should, entirely be destroyed if the Palestinians keep fighting. A history professor told the PBC that the “Jewish disease” is like smallpox. A school book praises the Iraqi insurgency as a “brave resistance”. Samir Kuntar, who killed a four-year-old girl and her father, was praised as a hero, again on the PBC. In Gaza the situation is even worse with a menagerie of animal characters urging children to take up arms and accept nothing less than the conquest of Tel Aviv.
And there are new examples all the time. Just last week a programme, again on Palestinian Authority television, praised a terrorist attack where a bus was hijacked and 37 civilians killed in 1978.
Unfortunately, British taxpayers’ money is supporting this kind of propaganda. We make bilateral donations both to support services in the territories and directly into the Palestinian Authority’s budget. The European Union also spends tens of millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money on aid to the Palestinian territories. Even when we’re just paying for the services that the authorities would otherwise be expected to provide, that frees money in their budget to spend on whatever they like (to put this in the language of development economics, aid to the Palestinian territories is highly fungible).
Britain donates around £100 million a year to the Palestinian territories. That creates a responsibility to ensure that the Palestinian authorities do not misuse their budgets. We need to use our influence as donors to insist that hate education is stopped.
In Northern Ireland, in 1989, a scheme was put in place called Education for Mutual Understanding. That was a conscious attempt to do exactly the opposite of what is currently going on in the Palestinian territories. A similar effort should be a prerequisite for British aid so that our money can support the peace process rather than propaganda that undermines it.
