Row over Palestinian Aid

This week Donald Trump has suggested that the USA may stop aid payments to the Palestinian Authority. He is reacting to their negative response to the USA’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

On 2^nd January he tweeted:

‘It`s not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries ...
As an example, we pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year
and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue …
peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation,
off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more.
But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, 
why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?’

The Palestinians have replied that they ‘will not be blackmailed!’

To some this may seem astonishing, given that the subject is aid payments – money given by one group of people to another group in order to help them in difficult circumstances.

However, the Palestinians seem to have dropped into the attitude that aid payments are their right, that somehow other countries are obliged to support them. Thus they have stubbornly refused to stop payments to their terrorists despite the steady progress of the Taylor Force Act towards becoming law in the USA.

The special treatment of the Palestinians has been maintained by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and has troubled many people for years now. No other group of so-called refugees is treated in the same way.

Thus the world waits with interest to see how this situation develops, especially in the light of reports that some people in the Palestinian population are far from being poverty-stricken.