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Tillerson: Palestinians Ending Payments to Terrorists and Their Families
President Trump and PA President Mahmoud Abbas meeting at the White House, May 3, 2017.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson informed senators that the Palestinian Authority will no longer pay terrorists and their families for attacking Israelis. He made the comments Tuesday at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
“They have changed that policy and their intent is to cease the payments to the families of those who have committed murder or violence against others,” Tillerson said. He said that the Trump administration made it clear that the PA’s policy “is simply not acceptable to us.”
Tillerson and Trump discussed the issue with PA President Mahmoud Abbas during meetings in Washington and Bethlehem. “The President raised it, and I had a bilateral meeting with [Abbas] later and I told him — you absolutely have to stop this,” Tillerson said.
The PA has paid $1.12 billion to terrorists and their families over the past four years.
Promises made by Abbas are difficult to trust, but apparently terrorists are already feeling the pinch.
Scores of former Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel and living in the Gaza Strip said on Sunday their stipends from the Western-backed Palestinian Authority have been suspended in an apparent bid to appease Israel and the United States.
A spokesman for Palestinian prisoners said that 277 freed prisoners in the Gaza Strip, most of whom are aligned with the Islamist Hamas group that runs the coastal enclave, were surprised to find their May stipends had not been paid….
Zaid Al-Kilani, a former prisoner from Hamas who was serving a life sentence before he was freed in a prisoner swap for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 said:
“Abu Mazen (Abbas) is punishing freed prisoners by suspending the salaries they and their families rely on…We believe the Palestinian Authority has succumbed to American and Israeli pressure,” he said.
The State Department will have to keep the pressure on the PA to continue honoring this commitment. But if this new policy remains in force, it is a big win for the Netanyahu and Trump administrations.
Published in Foreign Policy, Islamist Terrorism
A really big win!! Thank you for reporting on it!
Wow. Finally!
This is a much more significant step on the road to a “peace processes” than the anti-Israel UN Resolution that Obama allowed to pass or John Kerry’s speeches in the days before Trump was elected.
I’ll believe it when the PA sends some money to the three Fogel children: Tamar, Roi and Yishai! (orphaned by the Itamar Massacre).
Great win if true.
Color me jaundice, I trust the Palestinians just a little more than Ryan and McConnell but I still don’t trust them.
Completely agree.
This is a huge victory for Tillerson and Trump, and an absolutely necessary (but not sufficient) one on the road to peace in the Middle East.
Yes ! I mean, finally, a president doing something that seems to make sense! now, Pleeeese let’s move the embassy to Jerusalem!
Assuming for the the moment that the US can effectively audit its support for the PA to ensure that this agreement holds, we can probably expect the PA’s funders in Europe and Qatar to make the support payments themselves, instead of using the PA as a cutout.
Still, it’s an important step.
Tillerson’s statement on London is worth noting:
This is yet another instance in which it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
On the one hand, it may be what it seems to be. On the other hand, I wonder how many of the imams were refusing the funeral services because of this:
Were all the MCB imams who refused funeral services condemning murderers as the statement was intended to convey? Were some or all acting in accordance with a ruling that the attackers were shahids (hence actually honoring them under the pretext of condemning them, gleefully cocking a snook at the stupid kuffar?)
A contact person for the statement is Yunus Dudhwala, who recently denied the existence of recent evidence of extremist influence in Britain’s mosques to Piers Morgan, and who has been described as “part of the problem” by the relatively moderate Quilliam Foundation.
Good citizens? “War is deceit?”
Wow, that seems like progress.
I visited Israel last year, I left thinking that there is no chance of any solution ever, because everyone, hates everyone else, it’s not just two groups, it’s groups within groups… and there is no way to satisfy so many factions.
However, there has never been this kind of state department, and I was there for two weeks, and give it little thought.
I was very glad to see the places that Jesus saw, and feel privileged to have gone.
It is for these type of events/changes in attitudes, just common sense little things that has for years made me go “whaaat???” why are we not doing anything to stop this. We pay the Palestinians and they take our money and give it to murderers and conveyors of mayhem as a payoff. Now will the Palestinians really stop doing this outrageous crap? Not likely. As has been stated above, odds favor this disgusting and immoral behavior will continue under a guise of some sort. But at least we aren’t just going about accepting this as normative behavior. It takes the Presidency of a man many call the worst of names, thought of as having the lowest of character, to act with a conscience such that we can be proud once again of our heritage and our values.
Can anyone explain why this wasn’t done under the Bush administration? Other than incompetence, I mean.
It seems such an obvious thing to do.
If we were dealing with even semi-productive human beings instead of savages, that $1.12 billion would have represented $1 million in seed funding to each of 1120 startup companies.
This.
If this turns out to be true, it’s huge.
Also, if true, Abbas better have good bodyguards.
But I don’t trust Abbas any farther than I can throw Andre the Giant.
And some people say the PA never makes any concessions. I wonder if they could see their way to letting the Protocols go out of print and stop teaching it to kids? If they only gave up all that racism for 10 minutes we might actually get somewhere.
They will start by giving them fake jobs and figuring we will tire of the fight. They might be right.
But I’d like to get to the point where a future candidate will have to say flat out “I favor paying salaries to people who kill Jews.” (Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t count.)
Yeah, this. There are consequences for pissing off murderers who haven’t been locked up.
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I’ll believe it when we hear that it is still in place in a year and there is a sympathetic article in the Post or NY Times about the hardships of terrorist families.
Abbas should have done this long ago, if nothing else for his own benefit. Most of the Hamas terrorists would kill him if they could. It is shear madness for him to subsidize their violence and hate.
http://m.jpost.com/app/article/496823
Non-mobile link:
http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/PLO-official-to-JPost-We-will-continue-to-pay-terrorists-Tillerson-is-wrong-496823
It did seem really unlikely.
When it sounds too good to be true . . .
I’m curious to hear more about this. Why did Tillerson say this? he must have had a reason. If the PA lied to his face, that will have consequences for them.
Is Tillerson truthful?
Much more so than the PA. I don’t know him personally, but you don’t get to be the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world if you have a reputation for misrepresenting what people say to you.
Makes a good ultimatum to Trump: either kill Abbas for lying to Tillerson or Congress impeaches Tillerson for lying to them.
Killing him might do more harm than good, but there darn well better be consequences.
Doesn’t keep you from getting taken, though. I wonder what Abbas said, and in what language, and if it wasn’t a language Tillerson speaks fluently, how it was translated. I still remember Arafat’s “c’est caduc” about the PLO charter and the “what did he mean by that” when what Arafat meant was “business as usual.”
Abbas’ power is pretty shaky anyway.
One wonders if there will be consequences for Abbas. One is too cynical to hope that the money for murderers will be cut off.
I think that what’s more likely is: Whether the money comes from the EU or an array of NGOs, (after all, it’s for the children) or Qatar, or some branch of ISIS, or from Turkey, or from Hamas as part of its power struggle with the PA, or from the hat being passed in various circles around the world, the payments will go on. There may be competition for who gets “credit” for providing the funds.
There may be a fig leaf for the PA if Abbas sees advantage in it: “see, we stopped making the payments.”
Wait, so if the PLO is denying this then what did we accomplish?
Catching them in a lie might produce fruit. I’m not getting my hopes up, but something could happen.