Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority recently announced that the PA will refuse to accept any part of the money that Israel collects as withholding tax on the salaries of Palestinian workers employed in Israel. Under the original agreement Israel set aside those funds and delivered them to the PA because the PA had no organization to track and collect taxes from Palestinian citizens working in Israel.
Israel decided, this year, to deduct from the funds transferred an amount equal to what the PA pays out as bonuses and rewards to convicted terrorists and their families. It was an Israeli decision similar to the American Taylor Force Act that cut aid to the PA as long as they supported terrorism. The amount deducted by Israel is about $140 million out of an annual total of $2.2 billion. That total is just about half of what the PA treasury gets as taxation income. The other half they collect themselves from Palestinians living in the areas under the civil jurisdiction of the PA.
The PA announcement says they won’t accept ANY of the funds collected for them by Israel if Israel doesn’t give them everything. They already had publicly stated that they would not change their behavior in order to have US Aid restored after it was cut in accordance with the US Taylor Force Act. Up to now, you may be surprised to learn, the PA had used a lot of the funds given to them for all sources including both taxation and foreign aid grants of all types, to subsidize terrorists and reward Palestinians for murder. I wrote murder as a generic term because the victims are not always Israelis, or even Jewish.
I have no idea how the PA expects to provide governmental services of all types when they voluntarily and unilaterally stop accepting what amounts to nearly half their annual budget, The statement made by Mahmoud Abbas may be just a propaganda ploy, but taken at face value it looks more like a temper tantrum from a spoiled child. If you won’t pay for me to be involved in doing bad things I won’t take any of your money. And that’s so even though most of the money is supposed to be mine and the amounts deducted were specifically because I won’t change my behavior.
Wetherhorn 