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 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.